Better Land Husbandry in Practice

This chapter uses case study material to illustrate a number of better land husbandry principles. These include: soil cover (examples from South and Central America); active farmer participation (example from Honduras); and soil moisture (examples from West Africa and Kenya). It ends with a cautionary note: that despite some claims to the contrary, better land husbandry does not guarantee protection against all of the soil loss and mass movements associated with extreme rainfall events (example of Hurricane Mitch in Honduras). This chapter is not designed to present detailed and numerous examples from around the world of better land husbandry in practice. For the reader who is interested in these examples, there are a number of accessible publications, for example Pretty and Hine (2001), Pretty and Koohafkan (2002) and Shaxson and Barber (2003).