It takes a lot of smarts to be a farmer. There’s so much you need to know. What to plant, when to plant, how to fertilise, how to irrigate. The farmers of Moamba in Mozambique have been passing on local knowledge about how to tend their crops for generations.  But the climate is changing faster than the locals can adapt their farming practices to suit the ever growing number of challenges they now encounter.

The folks at IIAM, Mozambique’s agricultural research institute, have been teaching the farmers some new techniques as part of a project supported by the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture. I paid them a visit to see what they have learned.

They showed me how they learned to set up a drip irrigation system and how to sow seeds and apply fertiliser along the drip lines. They also learned to make biochar and demonstrated how they applied it to the soil.

The farmers were very keen to show what they had learned and even more keen to start applying their new knowledge to their own farms.

All images used on this page were photographed by Michael Major for the International Center for Biosaline Agriculture and used here under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0