The present study uses georeferenced community level data to study the adoption of improved cowpea in northern Nigeria. One objective of this study is to find out which factors of the community of village level are significant determinants of adoption of improved dual-purpose (DP) cowpea variaties and management techniques.

• Without understanding what (and why) farmers need and are able to carry out, SLM uptake is likely to remain very limited. 
• ELMO is participatory tool to assessing farmers’ land management decision preferences & trade-offs.
• Is mainly concerned with identifying the social and economic drivers of land management decisions & understanding farmers’ preferences for different SLM practices.
• Intention is to better understand farmers’ own perceptions and explanations of the benefits, costs, advantages, disadvantages & tradeoffs associated with different la

In the northern highlands of Ethiopia, establishment of exclosures to restore degraded communal grazing lands has been practiced for the past three decades. However, empirical data on the effectiveness of exclosures in restoring degraded soils are lacking. We investigated the influence of exclosure age on degree of restoration of degraded soil and identified easily measurable biophysical and management-related factors that can be used to predict soil nutrient restoration.

Estimates of the area of swidden fallow secondary forest in Indonesia are inaccurate, partly because swidden agricultural practices giving rise to the secondary forest are heterogeneous. Throughout Indonesia, swidden agriculture is evolving into more intensive land use. A mixed secondary forest tree crop management appears to be the first stage towards a tree crop based production in Sumatra and Kalimantan. This changes the value of the forest/tree component of swidden agriculture, or the systems it evolves into.

The most prominent international responses to climate change focus on mitigation (reducing the accumulation of greenhouse gases) rather than adaptation (reducing the vulnerability of society and ecosystems). However, with climate change now inevitable, adaptation is gaining importance in the policy arena, and is an integral part of ongoing negotiations towards an international framework.

Livestock manure is an important source of nutrients for crop production in semi-arid West Africa. An assessment of the potential of manure to sustain crop production calls for an estimation of the amounts of manure that could be produced and captured and the feed resources required to maintain livestock used for manuring. This paper presents estimates of the amounts of manure produced by cattle, goats and sheep fed ad libitum under confinement. A model is presented to predict the yearly faecal output by grazing ruminants under fluctuating feed supplies.

This digital story was produced to communicate work done by the Nile Basin Development Challenge (NBDC), specifically activities undertaken by the team working on 'Technologies, Institutions and Policies'. The NBDC aimed to improve the livelihoods of farmers in the Ethiopian highlands through land and water management and was funded by the Challenge Program for Water and Food. For more information see: http://nilebdc.org