Enhancing sloping land management technology, adoption and dissemination

A Marcado, 'Enhancing sloping land management technology, adoption and dissemination', Farmers' adoption of soil-conservation technologies. Proceedings of the 9th annual meeting of the ASIALAND Management of sloping land network. Bogor Indonesia, 15-21 September, 1997, pp.25-45, 1998

Contour hedgerows of pruned leguminous trees have been promoted for almost two decades as a solution to the problem of sustainable crop production in the uplands. Despite the effort, adoption of the technology has not been widespread, due to various factors. Natural vegetative strips are a better alternative. Different extension models are described as a means to introduce the alternative to farmers in Claveria.The indiscriminate extension of supposedly superior soil-conservation techniques for the gedraded acid upland areas of Southeast Asia has sometimes led to fristration among farmers and the R&D community alike. There are only few cases, foe example, of wide scale adoption of multi-purpose tree hedgerows that sustain permanent cropping on the slope, a system commonly known as 'contour hedgerow farming' or 'alley cropping on the slope'. Techologies that are not based on site-specific biopysical and socioeconomic circumstances cannot be expected to maintain agricultural production and sustain natural resources because they will not be accepted by local farmers