An experiment was conducted at the research station of the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) at Machakos, Kenya from November 1989 to February 1996 to evaluate the effect of annual and perennial legumes on soil fertility, cereal yields and economic returns. The study evaluated six cropping systems: (1) continuous sole maize, (2) maize rotated with short-duration legume, ...

Nitrogen (N) cycling was determined in monocultures of Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench and alley cropped sorghum with Acacia saligna (Labill.) H. Wendl. in semiarid Northern Kenya. N input through biological N2 fixation of the acacia, N transfer from the legume to the intercrop and losses of applied N through harvest and 15 leaching were estimated using N enrichment. The biological N fixation and N...

Whilst most hedgerow functions depend upon hedgerow structure and hedgerow network patterns, in many ecological studies information on the fragmentation of hedgerows network and canopy structure is often retrieved in the field in small areas using accurate ground surveys and estimated over landscapes in a semi-quantitative manner. This paper explores the use of radar SAR imagery to (i) detect h...

Crop–hedgerow intercropping systems are important agroforestry for preventing soil degradation and nutrient losses on sloping cultivated land in the Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR) area of China. However, mechanism by which hedgerow spatial layouts planting patterns affect nutrients crop yields is still uncertain. A two-year field experiment was performed a 10° slope to investigate effects positio...

Sloping agricultural land technology (SALT), a form of hedgerow intercropping (HI) system, has been accepted as an appropriate land management practice to overcome some soil related constraints faced by farmers in marginal lands in the wet zone of Sri Lanka. Despite its effectiveness in soil conservation and soil fertility improvement, farmers are reluctant to adopt this practice due to the lac...

Trees in cropped fields may improve nitrogen (N) use efficiency by intercepting leached N, but crop yield will be reduced if the trees compete strongly with crops for N. Ideal trees for intercropping will take up N from deeper soil layers not accessed by the crop species. Spatiotemporal aspects of tree nitrogen capture niches were investigated within a hedgerow intercropping system by placing 1...

Silvopastoral systems are agroforestry that involves a combination of tree growing with the production livestock. This type system has potential to improve hydric balance, enhances biodiversity conservation, increases organic livestock proximity index, allows cleaner cattle production, improves per hectare, carbon sequestration, reduce greenhouse gases and significantly /eliminate herder -farme...