Integrated Soil Fertility Management: Contributions of framework and practices to climate-smart agriculture
This practice brief by The Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture (GACSA) focuses on Integrated Soil Fertility Management (ISFM). Integrated Soil Fertility Management (ISFM) is a set of practices related to cropping, fertilizers, organic resources and other amendments on smallholder farms to increase production and input use efficiency. ISFM delivers productivity gains, increased resilience, and mitigation benefits. ISFM benefits food security and incomes enhances yield stability in rainfed systems, and reduces greenhouse gas emissions from soils and fertilizers making it of value to climate-smart agriculture. A key message is that ISFM interventions are built on the premises of increasing productivity and profitability for smallholder farming systems. Practising ISFM has further shown to enhance the stability of yields under adverse rainfall oscillations. Lastly, important reductions in greenhouse gas emissions can be made through ISFM owing to greater uptake of N fertilizers by crops and soil C sequestration. Furthermore, a number of ISFM practices have been successfully brought to scale, each of which leading to major improvements of livelihoods and land use. What’s more, these programs illustrated that access of farmers to quality inputs, information, off-takers and credit is of huge importance to achieve effective adoption of ISFM.