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Biblioteca To mulch or to munch? Big modelling of big data

To mulch or to munch? Big modelling of big data

To mulch or to munch? Big modelling of big data

Resource information

Date of publication
Maio 2017
Resource Language
ISBN / Resource ID
handle:10568/79783
License of the resource

African farmers are poorly resourced, highly diverse and aground by poverty traps making them rather impervious to change. As a consequence R4D efforts usually result in benefits but also trade-offs that constraint adoption and change. A typical case is the use of crop residues as mulches or as feedstock. Here we linked a database of household surveys with a dynamic whole farm simulation model, to quantify the diversity of trade-offs from the alternative use of crop residues. Simulating all the households in the survey (n = 613) over 99 years of synthetic climate data, showed that benefits and trade-offs from “mulching or munching” differ across agro-ecologies, and within agro-ecologies across typologies of households. Even though trade-offs between household production or income and environmental outcomes could be managed; the magnitude of the simulated benefits from the sustainable intensification of maize-livestock systems were small. Our modelling framework shows the benefits from the integration of socio-economic and biophysical approaches to support the design of development programs. Our results support the argument that a greater focus is required on the development and diversification of farmers' livelihoods within the framework of an improved understanding of the interconnectedness between biophysical, socio-economic and market factors.

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Authors and Publishers

Author(s), editor(s), contributor(s)

Rodriguez, D.
Rufino, M.C.
Odendo, M.
van Wijk, Mark T.
Voil, P. de
Lancaster University

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