Planspiel-Literaturdatenbank des ZMS

Abstract: Mixed crop-livestock systems have potential for higher nutrient recycling and limited nutrient import than specialized crop or livestock systems. However, crop and livestock production in mixed farming system of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) remains far from optimal and faces several challenges such as fast growing population and land degradation. Numerous studies attempted to find solutions to unravel these challenges and improve crop-livestock production by focusing on particular components of the farm system. However, farm systems are made up of components interacting between each other, implying for example that a ‘good’solution at plot scale for soil fertility improvement may not be in line with households’ income increase at farm scale. Research that considers this complexity at different scale levels and combines social and biophysical dimensions of the farming system is scarce in SSA.