Advocates of agroecology and organic agriculture—people like me—often criticize conservation agriculture because it allows for artificial fertilizers and herbicides. But during my recent trip to Ethiopia, I was reminded that conservation agriculture can also be a powerful and practical tool for farmers, especially when resources are scarce.
I like to think about agrochemicals as medicine. They’re not something farmers should rely on every day or every season. But they can help treat problems—like degraded soils that won’t otherwise be productive, or overwhelming weeds when labor is short.
At the same time, I’ve seen how conservation agriculture practices—more diverse cropping systems, intercropping, no-till, and agroforestry—can reduce or even eliminate the need for those inputs. This can create a win-win-win scenario: farmers save money, natural resources are protected, and food and nutrition security improve.
“It’s not only an increase in yield, but diversity,” said Alemayehu Koysha, Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Manager at the Terepeza Development Association (TDA). “And diversity has meaning for income.”
His colleague, Tilahun Tadesse, a Senior Programs Manager at TDA, put it another way. “It’s not the size of the land, but the productivity that matters.”
For the past three years, the Scaling Conservation Agriculture-Based Sustainable Intensification (SCASI) initiative—a collaboration between the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and regional partners like TDA—has worked with nearly 75,000 farmers in southern Ethiopia to promote context-specific practices. The approach is not prescriptive and gives farmers the opportunity to experiment in the field and learn from one another.
Switching away from conventional agriculture isn’t easy. Farmers everywhere are risk averse—if your livelihood depends on your harvest, it makes sense to stick with what you know. That’s why cluster farming and farmer-to-farmer mentoring are so important. In Ethiopia, I saw groups of three to five households working together, experimenting, and sharing knowledge. Farmers trust each other more than outside experts, and seeing success firsthand makes change more likely—and less risky—because they see their neighbors doing the same thing.
One way farmers are working together is by coordinating the use of herbicides like Roundup. Roundup is one of the most widely used herbicides in the world, produced by Bayer, with glyphosate as its active ingredient. It’s effective against broadleaf plants and grasses, and it can help regulate plant growth and ripening. But it’s also controversial.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classifies glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A), while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says it is “not likely to be carcinogenic.” Beyond human health, glyphosate can leach into groundwater, affect soil microorganisms, and harm insects and plants it wasn’t meant to target.
Still, agronomists like Daniel Markos Bura at the Hawassa Agricultural Research Center and Birhan Abdulkadir, a Research Officer at CIMMYT, explained to me that on severely depleted soils, glyphosate can sometimes help farmers produce enough biomass to eventually move away from herbicides altogether. With mulching and other regenerative practices, reliance on chemicals can decline over time.
Government extension agents often recommend Roundup, even though it’s expensive. As Tadesse told me, it can be “tough to get extension agents to surrender” their attachment to herbicides. But when agents compare demonstration plots—conventional agriculture versus conservation agriculture—they begin to see how conservation agriculture can work without chemical inputs.
What struck me most in Ethiopia was the resilience and creativity of farmers. As Bura put it, “Farmers are trying everything.” They grow staples like maize and taro, but also coffee, turmeric, soy, yams, honey, and indigenous crops like enset (false banana).
“If not for enset, people would not survive,” he told me. It’s the crop that gets families through the hunger season, bridging the gap between harvests. It’s also a reminder that resilience comes from diversity—not dependence on a single crop or a single tool.
So, to Roundup or not to Roundup? The answer, as always in agriculture, is complex. Farmers need choices, flexibility, and the power to decide what works best in their fields. Agroecology and conservation agriculture both have a role to play, and what matters is ensuring that farmers have the support to experiment, adapt, and thrive, not just survive.
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Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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