Integrated sustenance of feed, wood and food from traditional agroforestry tree inter-crop
1999
Dechasa Jiru(Forestry Research Center, Addis Abeba (Ethiopia))
Influence in the vicinity of single tree Faidherbia albida tree inter-crop on four major cereals namely sorghum, maize, wheat and tef was determined. The response was higher for bigger stalk crops like sorghum and maize while it was extremely small for smallest crops like tef. The average increase for four main cereals was 55% under the tree 0-2.8m, compared to 13-15 m away in the open. With the exclusion of legume cropping, and fertilizer in the series and assuming that those cereals were rotated in the farming system, an average yield increase was taken to determine an optimum spacing of trees (50 trees/ha) for optimum cereal production. The second part of the study deals with the green leaves feed after pollarding branches traditionally from 17 similar trees in the same farms. The fresh materials were given to 290 goats. The browsed branch on average was 53 kg/tree. The amount of green feed supplement obtained requirement green feed supplement by the farmers. The third part of the study deals with amount of fuel wood supply from same trees using water displacement method of wood volume determination and higher heating value (HHv) where a bomb-calorimeter was employed for comparison. This result was compared with total fuel wood consumption per average family per year and it was higher (8.4 mE3 wood) than the average requirement. Had there been no wood, 7 tons of cow dung or 6 tons of crop residue would have been used as fuel wood substitute. Such yearly depletion of organic nutrient would have been a significant loss that results in soil degradation. All benefits like crop yield increase, supplement feed and wood was obtained without any sacrifices of space in tree inter-crop traditional farming. This study aims towards an integrated optimisation of food, feed and wood in sustainable supply in traditional tree inter-crop agroforestry system in semi arid parts of Ethiopia.
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This bibliographic record has been provided by Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research