Thank you.
As I said, our own program at the Foodgrains Bank has a lot of experience in this. We've dealt mostly with methods called conservation agriculture—any Canadian farmer will know what I'm talking about—with minimum tillage and soil cover and crop rotations.
The principles are the same, whether you're dealing with a thousand hectares or half a hectare. The tools are different, of course. However, using conservation agriculture, we have worked in about a dozen African countries, with close to 100,000 African farmers. We find that it's a knowledge-intensive approach that doesn't require them to purchase a lot more inputs. Once they've learned it, then they can keep practising it year to year.
It often spreads to neighbours—what we call spontaneous adoption. People who were not even in touch with our extension agents are now picking up these techniques and passing them on. Yields increase by an average of two to three times. Sometimes yields increase by five times over a period of only a few years.
Conservation agriculture is one knowledge-based approach. We also have experience with a variety of others, and lots of other organizations have as well, such as agroforestry and associations between crops and livestock. Think about fish as livestock as well, so fish ponds and crops, etc. Intercropping between maize and legumes helps them both. There are a variety of techniques that are knowledge intensive rather than input intensive, which can dramatically increase yields beyond that one or two tonnes per hectare and much higher than that.