Zambia's Conservation Farming Unit — National Smallholder Conservation Agriculture Programme

The Conservation Farming Unit (CFU) was established in 1995 by the Zambia National Farmers Union, with early funding from the Royal Norwegian Government's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to promote conservation farming among Zambia's smallholder maize growers. Its lead-farmer extension model teaches minimum tillage (permanent planting basins or ripping), crop residue retention, and rotation with nitrogen-fixing legumes such as soybean, instead of annual ox- or tractor-ploughing.

A multi-year programme of roughly 100 on-farm trials across Zambia (2016-2021), comparing conservation agriculture plots (maize rotated with soybean) against conventional monocropped, ploughed plots, found maize grain yields were 24% to 39% higher under conservation agriculture, attributed to earlier sowing and more effective use of limited precipitation (published in Plant and Soil, 2024). A separate study found that crop-residue retention, alone or combined with rotation, raised maize yields by up to 360 kg/ha (28%) even under fall-armyworm pressure.

CFU now works with partners including GIZ and CIMMYT and reports training more than 100,000 farmers a year, with regional offices beyond its Lusaka head office in Kalumbila, Mwinilunga and Kasempa. Adoption is real but partial: a national survey found 86% of monitored plots used at least one conservation-farming practice, but only 26% had adopted the full conservation-farming package, meaning the strongest yield and soil benefits are still concentrated among a minority of participating farmers.

Read the full analysis: https://conservationagriculture.org/