View article

The spatial variability in crop yields commonly observed in smallholder farms of sub-Saharan Africa is often caused by gradients of declining soil fertility with increasing distance from the homestead. This heterogeneity means that recommendations based on regional soil surveys are of limited value. The variability in soil qualities within farms must be considered when designing management strategies, and their feasibility analysed by integrating results at the farm livelihood scale. For this purpose, we have developed the model FARMSIM, a dynamic bio-economic model for analysis and exploration of trade-offs in resource and labour allocation in heterogeneous smallholder farms. Focusing on farm-scale strategies, the approach to simulation of soil and crop processes in FARMSIM (the sub-model FIELD) is designed to be simple, but to keep the necessary degree of complexity to capture heterogeneity in resource …