Enhancing Crop-Livestock Systems in Conservation Agriculture for Sustainable Production Intensification

This is a story about how FAO assisted groups of farmers in five farming communities in the moist savanna zone of South Western Burkina Faso to enhance their crop-livestock systems through Conservation Agriculture (CA) practices, including crop diversification, using an innovative farmer discovery process, to bring about agricultural intensification and improvement in livelihoods. FAO worked with a range of stakeholders including the farmers and their communities to create convergence and enable a farmer-based discovery process to experiment with a set of fundamentally new principles and elements in their farming practices for integrated crop-livestock production intensification. The positive outcomes offer a real promise and an opportunity for bringing about a large scale impact on agricultural productivity and livelihoods in the moist savanna zone West Africa. This publication describes the multi-stakeholder process which led the successful outcomes, and the opportunity for a greater change that now exists and should be harnessed for sustainable agriculture development, nationally and regionally.