Farmers Restore Soil in Malawi
Photo by Dooshima Tsee/CRS
It is June and the middle of winter in Malawi. Located in the Southern hemisphere toward the Southern tip of Africa, Malawi experiences a cooler, dry season from late May to August. Across the country, and throughout much of Southern Africa, vegetation dries and fields lay fallow until rains resume in late November.
Farmers are intimately familiar with and depend on this weather pattern. It is a cycle as old as time. However, weather patterns have become variable and uncertain in recent decades. Some years, rains stop earlier and restart later. In other years, there is so much rain that fields flood. And in other years, there is barely any rain. This variability is what is most dangerous for farmers in Malawi. Small-scale farmers predominantly practice rain-fed agriculture. Whether the rains come early or late, they can plant only one crop per year. Weather variability means that skills that have served them for generations of farming are now inadequate.
Degraded land is a global problem. Data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services states that about 52% of the earth's agricultural land is already infertile. If the current trend continues, 95% of the earth could be degraded by 2050.
Increasingly, farmers face conditions they have never had to deal with before. Each year, because of this climate variability, as well as declining soil health, the quality and quantity of food shrinks as harvests get smaller and become insufficient to meet the food or income needs of families who depend on subsistence farming.
Wilfred Charles, in red, walks with other members of the watershed management committee in Lingoni, Malawi.
Photo by Dooshima Tsee/CRS
Approximately every five years, most of sub-Saharan Africa experiences damaging El Niño conditions, the unusual warming of waters in the eastern-central equatorial Pacific Ocean. Communities have typically anticipated and accounted for the El Niño effect. Climate change and land degradation exacerbate this weather event, worsening the floods or droughts driven by El Niño. In addition, most rural farmers acquire land by inheritance. With a rising population, families divide the land into smaller and smaller parcels as it is passed down from generation to generation. Farmers can plant less produce on these smaller plots. Some farmers, who irrigate their fields after the rains end, try to cope with the reduced harvest from smaller plots by planting more frequently, trying to get several rounds of crops in one season. This gives the land less time to rest and recover after every planting season, leading to soil degradation and land that yields poor quality crops.
Where irrigation farming is an option, rainfall is caught in ponds or small dams. These ponds and dams are often community-owned and provide gravity-fed irrigation to nearby farms during the off season. However, this means that only plots located below ponds can be irrigated. Typically, communities allocate those irrigation-favorable plots to the most vulnerable families so they can supplement their production from their primary rain-fed fields. Overall, while ponds and dams are a critical source of water for irrigation, water resources can quickly be overused and exhausted, reducing the potential for irrigation. The dual prongs of climate change and land degradation work together to drive food insecurity and poverty in communities.
The Lingoni community, a small settlement nestled beneath a mountain in the Machinga district in southern Malawi, holds some answers to the water availability dilemma. Dry fields surround the communities neighboring Lingoni. This is expected at this time of year. As you turn into Lingoni, a very different sight greets you. Green fields unfurl on both sides of the road and continue to the base of the mountain. Well-watered rice fields, fields with tall stalks of corn, and garden patches with tomatoes, sweet potatoes and vegetables lie side by side.
Wilfred Charles, the chairperson of the Lingoni watershed management committee, considers it his life’s calling to care for the land and water sources in his community. For almost a decade and a half, he has worked diligently to first learn, then build, and now coordinate other farmers to maintain the watersheds and water structures in his community.
A long line of farmers, all water management committee members, walk along the bush path in a single file. They are headed to the water intake point of the Lingoni river. The farmers will spend the better part of the morning clearing the debris from the gutters carrying water from the intake point to the check dam—a small structure used to curb erosion—and then through channels into the farms at the base of the mountain. Wilfred brings up the flank of the line. During the 10-minute walk he stops a few times to open or close water channels, diverting water away from watered fields and into fields thirsty for water. The path winds through corn fields. Some stalks are taller than a grown adult, with heavy ears of corn only a few short weeks from harvest. In other fields the plants are just beginning to poke tender shoots through the brown earth.
Wilfred Charles opens an irrigation channel for farms in Lingoni, Malawi.
Photo by Dooshima Tsee/CRS
The water management committee was formed 14 years ago by the Wellness and Agriculture for Life Advancement project, or WALA. WALA was an integrated multi-year assistance program in Malawi’s southern region implemented by a nine-member consortium of non-governmental organizations and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. WALA provided support to 32 communities in southern Malawi to rehabilitate micro-watersheds in their communal areas. The Lingoni watershed was part of this small watershed management pilot component of the larger WALA project. In addition to basic soil and water management structures like continuous contour trenches, the project also constructed check dams, water infiltration pits and other water management structures across the Lingoni watershed.
In 2009 when the WALA project began, things were coming to a head. Lingoni was experiencing desperate water shortages during the dry season. As water in wells dried up, women fought for water. Drought was a real worry for families. When the WALA project started, it prioritized soil and water management with irrigation as a more long-term benefit of improved water resources and systems.
“One of the first questions we asked was, ‘What can we do to reverse the degradation that has happened in the soil and landscapes?’” says Juma Masumba, CRS’ technical lead for carbon- markets and value chains. “We were working on the farmstead level, but we had to consider the work that needed to be done on the hills and escarpments where soil erosion is happening and from which uncontrolled runoff causes a great loss of water resources as well as soil erosion in the farm fields below. An approach that goes beyond the farmstead level to what is considered community land, the source of water, is what was needed.”
“I am not worried about building back after the cyclone. With this work I do, I know I can earn the income I need to rebuild."
The program began with training the community on watershed management approaches and training individual farmers in soil and water management for their farms, emphasizing carefully timed and efficient planting, spacing, and soil and ground-cover management. When farmers in Lingoni started managing both the communally owned areas—reforesting hillsides and building structures to slow the water movement off the slopes—as well as their farms, farmers in the watershed pilot areas of the WALA project increased their rain-fed corn yields by over 65% compared to farmers in similar sites outside of the managed watersheds. This was mainly due to helping more rainfall percolate into the soil and move downslope, which resulted in more soil water for crop growth.
Supporting communities in restoring and managing the health of natural resources at the landscape level and improving water management practices at the farm level is a strong pairing that produced dramatic results for water availability and crop yields in Lingoni.
The work the community put in paid off in both short and long-term impacts. By 2016, wells were no longer drying up and the community saw a significant improvement in water supply. Farmers had better crop yields in dry years than they used to get in wet years before the intervention.
The price of decision delay
Edwin Mbalama tends his shop in Lingoni, Malawi. Edwin farmed with his parents as a boy before he inherited their farm. He opened this shop as a second source of income.
Photo by Dooshima Tsee/CRS
After the project ended in 2014, Wilfred and other community members continued to maintain the water management systems. With the extra rainwater they captured, they expanded their irrigated area from the initial 25 acres during the project to more than 220 acres.
Today, everyone in the community supports the work Wilfred and his committee do. They have seen the impact over the decade. But that wasn’t always the case. When the project started, program teams found it difficult to convince farmers to participate in program activities. Only five other farmers agreed to join Wilfred and learn the new agricultural methods the program offered. When construction began for the water structures, many farmers refused to let the water channels pass through their fields. Edwin Mbalama was 21 years old at the time. He remembers his parents declined construction of water channels through their fields. Fourteen years later, Edwin now owns the land his parents used to farm.
"More than 10 years after the WALA project ended, the impact of the community’s work in soil and water management and irrigation has expanded to neighboring communities."
He inherited this land with two siblings when his parents retired. He benefits from water management practices that other community members have diligently carried out for over a decade and from water systems built in other parts of the community. Edwin is now part of the water management committee, but because his fields are further from the water systems, he works many more hours, often into the night, to irrigate his farm.
In 2022, cyclone Freddy swept through parts of southern Africa, affecting communities in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Madagascar and Malawi. Winds and floods from the cyclone destroyed Wilfred’s home. But he is sufficiently resilient that he can afford to rent a house for himself and his family while he rebuilds his home. After the cyclone, the government surveyed communities to determine which were most impacted and should receive disaster relief aid. Even though Lingoni was in the direct path of the cyclone, the community scored high on the resiliency scale and was not assigned aid.
“I am not worried about building back after the cyclone. With this work I do, I know I can earn the income I need to rebuild. Other communities are much worse off.” Wilfred says.
Downstream benefits
A farmer irrigating crops during the off season in Lingoni, Malawi.
Photo by Dooshima Tsee/CRS
The project in Lingoni was so successful that they no longer require food aid.
Farmers in outlying and downstream communities are reaping the benefits of the foundational landscape work in numerous ways. Over the years, the water supply in Lingoni became so abundant that the government reached out to the community in 2022 to discuss building irrigation infrastructure to supply a neighboring community with water. That construction is almost complete. Downstream communities now have water to irrigate their farms. Even farmers with smaller farm plots are able to harvest adequate produce because they plant two or three times on the same piece of land. They carefully manage the crop types they plant to ensure the land isn’t degraded and stripped of nutrients.
Wilfred and the other members of the Lingoni community water management committee are dedicated to sustaining and expanding water and soil management interventions at both farm and landscape levels for the long term. They have become a resource for the government and neighboring communities. Last year, the agriculture extension office requested that Wilfred travel to a nearby community and teach them the agricultural, water and soil conservation methods that have helped Lingoni prosper and recover after disasters like cyclone Freddy.
Just add water
Wilfred Charles, in red, works with other members of the watershed management committee to clear debris from a canal in Lingoni, Malawi.
Photo by Dooshima Tsee/CRS
Mariko Maulana has beehives behind his house. To the side of his home there is a greenhouse with sawdust-filled plant beds where he propagates his banana suckers. A fishpond, a vegetable garden and a tree nursery flourish on different parts of the quarter-acre plot his home is built on. It is a small ecosystem of agricultural production. Cultivating varied agricultural produce is a farming method the farmers in the water management committee encourage.
“If the vegetables do not do well, the bees might do well enough to cover for that loss. Or the bananas might produce a good crop if the fish fail,” Mariko says.
It all works together to reduce the impact of shocks and stressors.
All of this is possible because water availability in Lingoni has improved enough to accommodate increased agricultural production for farmers. The community’s commitment to maintaining the initial water management structures built by WALA and protecting forests on the hillsides was critical to increasing water availability, food security and prosperity.
“The Lingoni community built basic infrastructure like dams, gully plugs and infiltration pits, adopted improved soil and water management practices on their farms, and mobilized to restore their watershed. The results were impressive. Within two years, their stream’s flow rate tripled and wells no longer dried up. More than 10 years after the WALA project ended, the impact of the community’s work in soil and water management and irrigation has expanded to neighboring communities. These practices will require massive scaling to achieve the impacts that are required to eliminate hunger and food and water insecurity globally. This is why we are committed to supporting communities in safeguarding their natural resources,” says Geoff Heinrich, CRS senior technical advisor for livelihoods and landscapes programming.
The Lingoni watershed project demonstrates that the synergy of farm and soil and water conservation has long-term impact on water availability with a clear line to improved agricultural production, food security and poverty reduction. This approach is essential at the foundational level with the end goal to support irrigation and diversified livelihoods. As climate patterns change and bring less reliable rainfall, water resources management will be increasingly important for food security.
