Total LandCare–CIMMYT Conservation Agriculture Partnership — Nkhotakota, Malawi

In 2005, the Malawian NGO Total LandCare (TLC) began working with CIMMYT (the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center) to introduce conservation agriculture — minimum tillage, permanent soil cover with crop residues, and crop rotation or intercropping with legumes — to smallholder maize farmers in Nkhotakota district. The pilot started with just six farmers each in the Mwansambo and Zidyana Extension Planning Areas.

Long-running, peer-reviewed monitoring has since documented both the benefits and the difficulty of sustaining adoption. A study of conservation-agriculture systems in central Malawi found measurable improvements in soil structure and hydraulic properties compared with conventional ridge tillage, and CIMMYT-monitored trials found that mulching from retained residues reduced evapotranspiration and conserved soil moisture, helping to buffer maize yields under drought and heat stress. An early adoption survey in 2014, however, found only 10% of 300 surveyed farmers had adopted all three core conservation-agriculture principles, and a 2024 sentinel-site study (Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, Cambridge University Press) found that around 40% of initially enrolled farmers eventually dropped some or all of the practices.

Despite that attrition, TLC reports that in areas such as Mwansambo, more than 57% of farmers now practise conservation agriculture after nearly two decades of continuous extension support, and the partnership has since expanded to other districts, including Nsanje and Salima. The programme illustrates both a genuine, evidenced soil and moisture benefit and the real-world difficulty of locking in full, sustained adoption at scale — a caution against assuming initial uptake will hold.

Read the full analysis: https://www.cimmyt.org/blogs/beyond-handshakes-and-agreements-the-real-work-behind-scaling-conservation-agriculture-in-malawi/