The role of legumes in the sustainable intensification of African smallholder agriculture: Lessons learnt and challenges for the future.

The telling sentence of the abstract is: the ultimate condition for increased uptake of grain legumes by smallholder farmers lies in the understanding of how legume technologies and management practices can be tailored to the enormous diversity of agroecologies, farming systems, and smallholder farms in SSA. 

In summary - the approach we used - (GL x GR) x E x M - was very powerful to unravel how best to boost legume grain yields and inputs from nitrogen fixation - essentially we know how to grow legumes with well-adapted varieties and rhizobial inoculation where needed. Getting more legumes produced is largely an issue of getting the appropriate technology adapted to local contexts. Particularly, we faced problems to get the right technologies into farmers’ hands - this is an issue of input and outputs markets and knowledge dissemination.