The Green Revolution converted the Indo-Gangetic Plains (IGP) into South Asia’s cereal basket. The recent slow down in cereal productivity growth and continuing poverty in the IGP pose a major challenge to agricultural research and development. To address this challenge it merits revisiting...

Agriculture in eastern Africa is predominantly rainfed and maize is a major food crop,primarily produced for home consumption and the market by small-scale family farms. The study characterized farm households in the drought prone maize growing areas of eastern Africa synthesizing data from...

We estimate the impact of drought tolerant maize varieties in 13 countries in sub-Saharan Africa using geo referenced farm-trial data from 49 locations in eastern and southern Africa. Planting dates were matched with rainfall data in order to generate better drought risk zones in each country....

Conservation agriculture (CA) is promoted worldwide to enhance soil quality, improve farmers’ incomes and increase the resilience of rainfed agro-ecosystems under climate change. A major constraint to the adoption of CA is crop residue management in mixed crop–livestock systems. Farmers have...

Crop residues (CR) have become a limited resource in mixed crop-livestock farms. As a result of the increasing demand and low availability of alternative resources, CR became an essential resource for household activities, especially for livestock keeping; a major livelihood element of...

In complex mixed crop-livestock systems with limited resources and biomass scarcity, crop residues play an important but increasingly contested role. This paper focuses on farming systems in the semi-arid areas of Zimbabwe, where biomass production is limited and farmers integrate crop and...

Crop residues have several uses in smallholder mixed crop-livestock systems. This paper examines determinants of households’ maize stover use as livestock feed, fuel and soil amendment in maize-based systems in Ethiopia. In these systems maize stover is primarily used as feed (56% of biomass)...