Conservation agriculture
Farming that leaves the soil better than it found it.
Rwanda farms on hills, and every heavy rain takes some of the topsoil with it. We train farmers in minimum tillage, mulching, cover crops and rotation, then keep coming back through the season until the practice holds.
Most of the farmers we work with have under one hectare, often split across two or three plots on a slope. The advice that works on flat, mechanised land does not help them. What helps is a short list of practices they can start on a corner of one plot and judge for themselves.
We start with the soil. Farmers dig a profile pit at the demonstration plot and look at what is actually under their feet. Then we work through minimum tillage, planting lines and spacing, mulch cover, compost, and cover crops for the fallow months.
Nobody learns ridging from a slide. Every session is on a plot, with tools, and everyone works. We run the same group across a season so they see the plot at planting, at weeding and at harvest.
Farmers who join a training group agree to keep simple records for one season. That is how we know whether the advice is worth giving to the next group.
Projects
Every project below sits under this pillar.
A practical training series on better agricultural practice: ridging, spacing, mulching and compost. Farmers opened the furrows themselves on the demonstration plot rather than watching someone else do it.
A teaching plot on school grounds, run by students through a full season. The harvest goes to the school kitchen, and the measurements go into their coursework.
Publications
Free to read and free to cite.
Enable Rwanda
A short account of how Enable Rwanda runs field training and why every session happens on soil with tools in people’s hands. Written for other organisations running agricultural extension in Rwanda who are deciding how to structure their own programmes.
Newsletter
A short email every month or so. Training reports, harvest results, and what we learned along the way. No noise.
