Smallholder Farmer Grain-Legume Integration in Central Malaw

Over the last two decades, researchers have heavily promoted grain-legume technologies as a soil amelioration strategy for smallholder farmers in Malawi. Although farmers have been involved in the development of and have expressed great interest in these technologies, their uptake of them has been minimal. Understanding this disconnect is important for both researchers and farmers because Malawian soils are not conducive to the current low-input continuous maize monocropping that dominates the Malawian landscape, ultimately resulting in marginal yields. Therefore, we used various methods and components of participatory action research to determine the drivers and implications of farmers' (n = 363) integration and management of grain-legume technologies in their maize-based cropping-systems. We explored farmers' perceptions associated with the promoted technologies' benefits as well as their on-farm soil fertility to understand farmers' reasoning for their grain-legume integration and management choices when collaborating with researchers. Additionally, we investigated the implications of these choices on subsequent maize production. Two survey instruments were used to determine farmers' perceptions of grain-legume technologies and to monitor farmers' cropping-system management in collaborative research trials (n = 1186) over four years (2013--2016). Soil samples (n = 1729) were collected and analyzed from both farmers' traditional maize plots and their collaborative trials to determine the soil properties associated with farmers' perceptions of soil fertility and cropping-system allocation choices. After four years of farmers' on-farm experimentation with grain-legume technologies, we conducted a field experiment on thirty collaborative research trials to determine the effects of farmers' current and historical management of grain-legume technologies on subsequent maize production.;We found that farmers' overall motivation for integrating grain-legumes into their maize-based cropping-systems was for soil amelioration. Yet, while farmers continue to indicate that they prefer grain-legume technologies over their continuous maize monoculture, in this study they perceived them to be inferior in terms of meeting farmers' immediate needs, like food security. This perception does not reflect scientific evidence showing that grain-legume integration in maize-based systems maintains and often increases maize yield, yet it was a major contributing factor in farmers' grain-legume integration decisions. Moreover, farmers' perceptions of soil fertility were associated with scientific indicators of soil fertility and heavily contributed to farmers' decisions and subsequent maize production. Foremost, farmers allocated their collaborative research trials to soils of lower fertility than their traditional maize plots. Within collaborative research trials, farmers preferentially allocated their soil amendment resources to continuous maize plots, which were allocated to soils of higher fertility than the grain-legume technologies. Farmers' preferential allocation was a key contributing factor in subsequent maize crop response where plots with a history of continuous maize intense cropping had a greater positive effect on subsequent maize crop production than plots with a history of legume intense cropping-systems.;This dissertation revealed some of the synergies as well as disconnects that exist between researchers and farmers associated with grain-legume integration. These findings have implications for technology uptake and collaborative on-farm research. We suggest that both farmers' grain-legume integration and their preferential allocation of maize-intense systems to higher fertility soils are two soil amelioration strategies used by central Malawian smallholder famers. Although, farmers' motivations for cultivating grain-legume technologies are aligned with that of researchers', e.g. integration as a soil amelioration strategy, farmers' incomplete understanding of associated management and livelihood benefits suppresses the potential associated benefits, like soil amelioration and increased food security. If not further understood, this disconnect may continue to limit farmers' uptake of these promising technologies and has the potential to introduce bias into future collaborative research efforts.;Therefore, we suggest that future efforts that promote agricultural technologies must intensify their farmer education to include the underlying agroecological principles associated with the promoted technologies. Not only does this have the potential to increase the success of the developed technology, it may ultimately provide farmers with the knowledge necessary to increase their overall cropping-system productivity based on sound scientific principles, without the assistance of researchers.