Farmer experiences, strategies and current approaches in intercropping
…From the outset of DIVERSify, we wanted to capture the experiences of farmers and encourage further experimentation and demonstration to explore what works and doesn’t work. Farmers are already innovating with plant teams, but a range of barriers to uptake do exist. Most identified barriers include a lack of advice, and complexities with harvest and processing…
Knowledge exchange on plant teams: the case of improved fallows in Kenya
…Several agroforestry technologies and farmer plant team innovations were identified as being used by farmers in Western Kenya. These included improved fallows, biomass transfer, rotational intercropping and ‘push and pull’. Plant teams are integral to the maize-common bean production system of smallholder farmers in western Kenya…
Market opportunities of plant teams for farm businesses
…Plant teams have the potential to improve business resilience through diverse new market opportunities. Whilst future policy and rural support options are uncertain, farmers who are more adept at adapting cropping systems are well placed to take opportunity of changing trends, such as the move towards healthy and sustainable food choices…
PAT and machinery solutions to practical barriers
…Practical solutions to overcome the barriers to plant team uptake exist across varying levels of accessibility, and for all barrier categories, in both unstructured and structured plant team designs. While engagement with PAT is likely to facilitate plant team cropping by supporting access to an increased number of solutions, a broad range of practical barriers can be overcome through machinery and novel product solutions independently of PAT uptake…
Addressing seed size challenges in plant teams
…When facing challenges around growing plant teams, such as seed size differences, in many cases only slight adaptations of machinery settings compared to monocropping might be needed. We think that machinery should follow the demands of the crop wherever possible and that precision agriculture, including the use of GPS technology, will facilitate the uptake of plant teams. Breeding is available to focus on challenges that cannot be addressed by agronomic or technical adaptations such as quality parameters, resistances to pathogens or plant architecture traits…
