The Tree That’s Changing Everything for Small-Scale Farmers in Zambia

I don’t believe she had ever planted a tree before. Though I can’t remember her name,  I will never forget the way her face lit up.  Kneeling down with her Gliricidia sepium tree seedling,  she gingerly placed its roots into its new home and filled the hole with dirt.  When she looked up, the smile on her wrinkle-worn face said it all.  She had successfully planted her first tree, probably in her entire life.  With her friends and family, she planted over 500 trees that day in her groundnut field.

From December 2020 to January 2021,  90,700 small-sale farmers across the Eastern, Central and Muchinga Provinces repeated this act by planting over 44,000,000 Gliricidia tree seedlings!  Perhaps the largest tree-planting operation ever undertaken in Zambia, and probably the region as well, COMACO is leading this initiative to help farmers replace chemical fertilizers with a tree that does it better and for free.

A growing number of small-scale farmers, over 140,000 to date, have discovered the benefits of this tree that also yields an annual, renewable supply of woody stems for cooking and a natural source of insect repellent to ward off army worms and other pests.  These farmers tell their stories over the radio that COMACO hosts on the Farm Talk program and a wave of interest for this new way of farming, called agroforestry, is growing fast.

Where there was once monoculture of maize, small-scale farmers are learning the value of rotating maize with legumes and having Gliricidia grown in rows along-side their crops. It is a land make-over.  Each year soils become richer with minerals that the Gliricidia tree mines with its roots, bringing Nature’s own source of nutrients within reach of food crops for better yields and more nutrient-rich foods for us to consume. Crop rotation is an important part of this process.  COMACO is working with scientists from ICRAF and IITA to help unravel the full extent of these benefits that will surely help transform rural landscapes to mirror the natural way that plants interact with and help improve soils.

There is another important part of the Gliricidia story. We know the climate clock is ticking with a growing urgency to find an affordable, efficient way that removes CO₂ from the atmosphere.  Gliricidia could be part of the solution if grown on sufficient scale.  Like all plants, Gliricidia breathes in CO₂ that gets turned into biomass, essentially locking up the CO₂.  Some of this biomass ends end up in the soil, decomposed and stored as carbon, which further improves soil health.  Even though the top-level stems are cut back annually to give the next season crop access to sunlight, these cut stems provide a fuel source for cooking, thus reducing the need to extract from local forests.  This translates into more CO₂ removed from the atmosphere, as local forests are able to store much more carbon.   How much could the 44 million Gliricidia trees planted this past year contribute to CO₂ removal?  At this point, we’re really not sure, but as Gliricidia trees grow and more are planted, contributing to a lowered risk of local deforestation, the volume of CO₂ removed from the air could be very significant.

Our little lady friend who planted her first tree had much more to smile about than perhaps she realized.  With more farmers making the switch to Gliricidia, COMACO hopes we all will have much to smile about as we give planet Earth a helping hand.  Can COMACO convince enough farmers to make the change?  We believe farmers have already answered the question as a growing legion of farmers remake their farmland with trees that fertilize their soils.

Written by COMACO CEO, Dale Lewis
dlewis@itswild.org