Climate change and land degradation affect countries across the world, reducing crop yields and destabilizing food security. Extreme weather events such as El Niño further exacerbate this problem. According to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) such as Malawi are particularly susceptible to these challenges due to high population growth, deforestation and soil erosion. Scientists with the CGIAR Research Program on Maize (MAIZE) are working to use climate smart technologies such as conservation agriculture (CA) and drought-tolerant (DT) maize varieties in conjunction to mitigate climate change and increase yields for vulnerable smallholder farmers.

To respond to the increasing threats of climate variability and declining soil fertility, MAIZE tested improved DT maize varieties in combination with CA in seven districts of Malawi. These efforts were conducted in collaboration with lead center CIMMYT and partners including Malawi’s Ministry of Agriculture and Total LandCare, an NGO working in Malawi, with support from USAID’s Feed the Future program. The trials were set up in a mother and baby trial design including 60 mothers (researcher-managed trials) and 360 babies (farmer-managed trials) across a range of agro-ecologies, farm types and environments.

Despite a strong El Niño in 2016 that left more than half of Malawi's population in need of food relief, farmers experienced a great response from CA systems and DT maize varieties. The best DT variety (Peacock 10) planted under CA demonstrated 66 percent higher yields in comparison with the best non-DT commercial variety (DKC80-53). This shows that a joint promotion of both of these climate-smart technologies, CA and DT maize varieties, can reap the benefit of both approaches as they are mutually re-enforcing.

Farmers were able to harvest comparably more maize than their peers in the 2016 cropping season while also spending 35-45 less labor days in the CA systems, where direct seeding was practiced, as compared to preparing conventional ridging and applying traditional weed control strategies. These multiple benefits preferentially benefit women and children who are usually tasked for this backbreaking work. Nepiyala Thope, a farmer from Chinguluwe, a small village in Central Malawi, appreciated the time she saved with CA. “We spend less time on the CA fields and use this time to expand our land area, relax at home, look after our children and make doughnuts to sell in the market and earn extra income. All of this benefits our households,” Thope said.

MAIZE’s work on GxExM, the genotype by environment by management interaction, spans from southern Zimbabwe to southern and central Malawi and eastern Zambia to support farmers with options they need to adapt to climate change. A study by MAIZE scientists published in 2016 on the benefits of CA and DT maize in Mozambique found that direct seeded manual CA treatments out yielded conventional tillage treatments in up to 89 percent of cases on maize. The study also found that improved DT maize varieties out yielded the traditional control variety by 26 to 46 percent (695–1422 kg ha−1) on different tillage treatments, across sites and seasons. In the future, as farmers will have to produce more food on less land in an uncertain climate, sustainable cropping systems and CA must be examined as viable options to improve food security and livelihoods.