Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management (SANREM)
Project Description
The purpose of the West African SANREM project is to develop and carry out collaborative research that will lead to improvements in the sustainability of farming and of pasture for livestock. The project area is in Mali, just south of the Sahara desert and close to the historic city of Djenné. Although it is near a large inland delta of the Niger River, allowing for some rice cultivation and some seasonal pasture for livestock, natural conditions are very harsh. Rainfall is scarce and erratic, the soil poor and the climate extremely hot. Soil erosion and decreasing soil fertility are becoming increasingly severe as arable land and pasture come under heavy pressure from human and livestock populations.
WSU, the Malian Institute for Rural Economics, Virginia Tech, and the farmers and herders in the area have developed and implemented the research program collaboratively. WSU researchers and their colleagues have combined field trials, biosystems modeling and economic analysis to evaluate the benefits of alternative approaches to sustainably increase crop yields and farm incomes.
These alternatives rely either on resources available to farmers or on relations they could develop with livestock herders. By assessing the costs and benefits of these techniques in quantitative terms, the program better equips farmers to decide which ones they can afford and what returns they can expect. Examples are:
* Using a natural phosphate mined in northern Mali as a fertilizer on the fields.
* Rotating or intercropping the most popular local crop, millet, with cowpeas (a nitrogen fixing legume).
* Applying manure from either cattle or small ruminants (sheep and goats) to fields.
* Applying chemical fertilizer in very small amounts (microdoses of 1 or 2 grams) to the soil next to the seed or young plant.
* Corralling livestock on fields at night before planting crops, to fertilize the soil naturally with no need to transport or spread manure.
The project is partially funded by USAID under its global Commodity Research Support Program (CRSP, pronounced “crisp”). The universities share costs in the form of faculty time and reductions in overhead charges. SANREM also has activities in Ecuador (managed by the University of Georgia) and the Philippines (led by the University of Wisconsin).
