| Report |
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| Title | Technical and institutional innovations to conservation farming and agroforestry: components of sustainable watershed management | | Author | Augustin R. Mercado Jr., Dennis P Garrity and Delia Catacutan | | Year | 1999 | | Institution | International Centre for Research in Agroforestry, SEA Regional Research Programme | | City | Claveria, Philippines | | Number of Pages | 13 | | Call Number | RP0048-04 | | Keywords | Conservation farming, Agroforestry, Watershed |
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| Abstract: |
| Sustainable watershed management is one of the focal issues in the debate about sustainable rural development in the Philippine uplands, where 18 million people eke-out a living on a slope above 30%. Contour hedgerows farming with leguminous trees is viewed as an important agroforestry technology that ensures food security, alleviate poverty, and protect the environment. This paper relates our experience in participatory approach in developing agroforestry technologies, and facilitation of institution-building for wide-spread adoption and harness support from different service providers, at the ICRAF research site in Claveris northern Mindanao, Philippines. For several years we focused our efforts in assesing the management strategies to address key technical constraints of the contour hedgerow system. We obseved thar adoption by farmer is low. The reasons for this include; high labor in establishment and maintenance of the hedgerows, resource competition above and below ground between the hedgerows and associated crops, limited value added from the hedgerrow prunings and poor species adaption.
We therrfore refocused our efforts toward finding alternatives system that will address the technical and social issues of conservation farming. We found that natural vegetative filter strips (NVS) provide simple solution to the technical and social constrains of soil conservation on sloping lands. These are buffer strips that are laid out on the contour in which the natural vegetation is allowed to grow into a thick and protective cover. NVS also provide a foundation for farmers to envolve into complex agroforestry systems with fruit and timber trees. We now see a tremendous surge of adoption of this system. Adoption has been enhanced by the Landcare approach. Landcare is a movement of farmer-led organizations supported by the local government that share knowledge about sustainable and profitable agriculture on sloping lands while conserving natural resources. The core of landcare is the triangulation of effective community groups, local government unit (LGU), and the technical facilitator. The Landcare movement in Claveria is the first of its kind in the Philippines. There are now 93 village-based Landcare groups and more than 2000 farmers involved. They have established more than1500 conservation farms, and more than 200 community and household nurseries that produced hundreds of thousands of fruit and timber trees seedlings, all done entirely with local resources. We now shating the landcare experience in other watershed in northern and central Mindanao. It has attracted the attention of the national government which sees the movement as a foundation upon which to build an effective community-based approach to sustainable agriculture and natural resources management. There is a major potential for enhancing this grassroots approach in other parts of the country as well as in the other countries in Southeast Asia. |
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