Association Autonomie Alimentaire Afrique (4A)

Our agroecological concept of agricultural resilience in dry and degraded soils:
Continuous creation of humus on dry and/or degraded soils.
A) By the installation of adapted fertilizing trees and shrubs. Installation in the form of hedges for market gardening and cereal crops. The shrubs grow quickly and can be pruned several times a year.
B) By creating grassy strips for arboriculture, composed of fodder plants and legumes.
Induced techniques:
1) Ramial Fragmented Wood for the direct creation of humus thanks to the important content of the fertilizer shrubs' prunings in vegetable proteins. Humus provides:
a. Improved natural moisture storage.
b. Carbon: The organic matter of the planet's soils stores more than twice the carbon of atmospheric CO2. Numerous researches show that it is not possible to retain carbon in the soil if there is not enough nitrogen to associate with it. The environmental interest becomes real if nitrogen is extracted from the air thanks to legumes. These are carbon and nitrogen dynamics, not ready-made recipes to be applied
2) Compost:
a. From the leaves either with the exchange with local farmers of these leaves for manure.
b. With the residues of unused fruit productions
3) Fermented Forest Litter, a product of anaerobic fermentation of leaves in the early stages of decomposition, collected from the forest and enriched with agricultural by-products rich in simple carbohydrates, such as molasses, starch or cellulose in the presence of lactic ferments.
a. This practice has been proven in Asia and Latin America where it contributes to the restoration of soil biodiversity.
b. Fermented forest litter includes yeasts, fungi and bacteria obtained through fermentation.
c. The mixture is an ecological soil activator, since it naturally brings in mass micro-organisms that bring the soil back to life.
4) Production of vegetable charcoal from the prunings of fertilizer trees, whose use in agriculture has the following interests
a. Natural hydro-retainer
b. Structuring and fertilization of the soil over a long period of time (very slow degradation of the vegetal coal)
c. Reduction of CO2 emissions
d. Increase of the Ph of the soil, especially on acid soils

Our agroecological concept is articulated in the experimentation, the demonstration, then the technical teaching on the fields of experimentation, because it is through the concrete that we can demonstrate to the farmers, the interest of this method.