Where a (sustainable) production system played a key role for the conservation of the biodiversity surrounding it?
At Go Organic East Africa, the focus has been on training for both farmers and under/postgraduate students on sustainable organic production with constant reflections on food systems in transition. Knowledge dissemination from multiple stakeholders has helped us pass the broader message of biodiversity conservation for agroecosystem health.
In our subsequent studies and analysis on certified organic agriculture and potential increase on agroecosystem health, we had interesting findings. Our hypothesis was that practicing certified organic agriculture would increase and balance agroecosystem health, including the ecological domain. Taking into account that the indicators in the ecological domain were mostly referring to agricultural practices rather than ecological preconditions, our findings did not support the hypothesis. This, however, does not explain why farms differed significantly in all domains of ecological health across the study sites. Rather, we attribute the difference to the fact that only farms in the ecology-driven cluster were applying key strategies of organic agroforestry: shading and mulching in an integrated cropping system.
Noel Templer