Smallholder farmers across Sub-Saharan Africa are choosing which legumes to plant with little reliable information on how different varieties will perform in their specific fields. This matters because despite decades of agricultural research, the poorest farming households have not adopted legumes at scale—missing out on their potential to provide food, animal feed, soil nutrients, and income. The problem is not a lack of legume options, but a lack of tailored guidance. Farmers need to know which legume will work best for their particular purpose, soil, and climate. The LegumeSELECT project will build a robust decision-support tool called LegumeCHOICE. It combines existing data with new measurements of legume performance—yield, nitrogen fixation, nutrient and water efficiency—under different conditions and management practices. The tool will be tested in real farming contexts and embedded with ongoing development initiatives. If successful, this tool could quietly transform agricultural supply chains and food systems in the region. Instead of blanket recommendations, farmers—especially women—would receive context-specific advice on which legumes to plant for grain, fodder, or soil improvement. This is a practical step toward improving food security, reducing poverty, and sustaining the natural resource base that rural communities depend on.
View original technical description
Growth in agricultural productivity lags behind population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) making the region increasingly food and nutrition insecure. Legumes have great potential to deal with many of the constraints to improve smallholder livelihoods and natural resource status, either in the form of grains for home consumption or sale, fodder for livestock feed, protein for health and nutrition, available soil nutrients, or fuel wood. Finding niches for multi-purpose legumes could help alleviate poverty, increase food security, improve nutrition and enhance natural resource status. However, despite several decades of agricultural research for development, so far there has been only limited uptake of legumes by poorest farming households. We will help redress this by developing an existing decision framework (LegumeCHOICE) aimed at increasing adoption of legumes in these systems. We will combine existing data with data we will generate here on relationships between legume performance (yield, ability to fix nitrogen, efficient use of nutrients and water) and interactions with their environment (such as influencing soil carbon and nitrogen stocks) under different conditions and managements, into an accessible database. This will form a robust LegumeCHOICE tool, that we will test for a range of specific contexts and will embed with ongoing development initiatives. It will help inform smallholder farmers as to which legumes to select based on desired purpose, anticipated performance for their own farm contexts, management and economics. This is an important step towards improving food and nutritional security, reducing poverty, and enhancing the production environment of smallholder farmers and rural populations, in particular women, in SSA.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know