Growing up on a small farm in India, Dr. Rattan Lal experienced much of the hardship faced by today’s smallholder farmers. His family didn’t have running water or electricity, but he explains, “We never missed it because that was the way everybody lived.”
As a farmer, his father struggled with irrigation challenges and the related issue of saline soil, both of which Lal later realised could be remedied by improving drainage of the land. But it wasn’t until after years of studying that he began to understand and teach the world about the fundamental role of soil.
In fact, a Nobel Peace Prize Certificate* and a World Food Prize later, Lal has changed the way we view sustainable soil management and has trodden new ground in what we now call Conservation Agriculture (CA), an approach that can play a huge role in restoring the world’s neglected soils, capturing carbon and combating food insecurity.
At its core, CA minimises soil disturbance (which means reducing tilling), provides permanent soil cover and diversifies crop production, all of which can contribute to enhancing biodiversity, reducing water use and improving soil health.
Conservation Agriculture plays an important part in how FAO supports small-scale farmers in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean. The benefits of this approach are numerous, from increased yields and reduced costs for farmers to healthier soils and greater carbon sequestration. Lal came to understand all of this and has since endeavoured to spread the word.
A pioneer
In the 1970s, when Lal was working for the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Nigeria, he discovered that by eradicating ploughing practices and simply covering the soil with crop residues he was able to produce five tonnes of maize per hectare every season; local farmers could only manage one tonne. Yet, for some reason, they still wouldn’t adopt CA practices.
He put this down to a distrust in no-till agriculture. Over forty years later, FAO and other organisations like the African Conservation Tillage Network (ACT) are scaling up CA practices in Africa with much more success.
For instance, through the project Strengthening coordination, scaling up and governance of Conservation Agriculture in Southern Africa, FAO is increasing the adoption of CA among farmers.
Given that this region is warming at twice the global rate, there is a pressing need to strengthen food systems and increase the resilience of farmers, many of whom practice either small-scale or subsistence farming. To do so, the project is boosting collaboration between governments, NGOs and development agencies, meaning that FAO and its partners are better able to document and share CA knowledge and best practices with farmers.
A recent example of such a collaboration comes from Zimbabwe, where FAO and the NGO, Foundations for Farming, have been supporting the government in its ambitious target of training 1.8 million farmers in CA.
“I see no reason why Africa cannot become the breadbasket of the world,” Lal says.