The development of improved agricultural technologies has tremendous potential for improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Conservation agriculture (CA) has been widely promoted to improve farmers' productivity and decrease their vulnerability to climate change. However, the benefits and challenges associated with reducing tillage vary by soil type and rainfall regime. Due to the complexity of both the livelihood strategies of resource-poor farmers and of their agro-ecological conditions, widespread adoption of any one form of CA is unlikely. Instead, technologies need to be adapted to specific agro-ecological and socio-economic contexts. The first paper in this dissertation uses the case of conservation agriculture (CA) in Mozambique to obtain an in-depth perspective on the challenges researchers and development agencies face in using innovation networks that include farmers and input suppliers to improve the process of technology adaptation. The results show widespread agreement among researchers and program managers about the need to locally adapt CA due to the agro-ecological diversity of Mozambique. However, they also show that farmers' involvement in CA research is limited to simply managing researchers' experiments. In contrast some NGOs work collaboratively with farmers through Farmer Field Schools to adapt CA to the local context. There is widespread agreement about the importance of establishing links across the value-chain, and lessons from nascent efforts to accomplish this are documents. The results also indicate that effective collaboration will require coming to terms with polarized disagreements on two key issues: the importance of emphasizing minimum tillage and the role of commercial inputs for CA. The second and third papers combine quantitative and qualitative analysis of farmers' practices in Eastern Zambia. A survey was carried out with 245 farmers in 15 communities where CA adoption was expected to be relatively high. In-depth interviews were carried out with 63 farmers and cotton company representatives. Despite farmers' favorable opinions, adoption remains low and disadoption is common. The main reasons farmers use minimum tillage are to improve their yields and to reduce their vulnerability to droughts. There are also a number of challenges preventing more widespread use of the technology. The increased effort needed for dry season land preparation is a key constraint. Households that have more available household labor were able to use MT on more of their land. Dry-season ripping is seen as too taxing for the oxen to make ripping services worthwhile. Farmers who use ripping tend to be better-off, enabling them to invest in the new equipment and take the risk of a new technology. Lack of adequate information also limits the number of farmers using MT. Farmers who have never tried MT tend to be poorer and have more diverse livelihood strategies.The main conclusion is that farmers are not stuck in traditional practices but are carefully evaluating CA with the information they have available to them. Widespread adoption will require adapting existing technologies to overcome technical challenges and developing new ones to match a broader range of resource endowments. This process could be greatly improved by drawing on farmers' experiences and recognizing them as active learners with valuable insights on the constraints and possible adaptations for the technologies.
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