 Colleague Collard Hamusimbi, who is the Outreach Coordinator for the Zambian Farmers Union to give you a little more background on how conservation agriculture is moving forward as a major success story in Zambia. Collard? Thank you very much. Dennis, my name is Hamusimbi Collard. I come from Zambia. My first time to be here in the US and it's a pleasure talking to you this evening. I want to tell you the short story about what is happening in Zambia with regards to conservation farming. This is about the program we've been pushing as a farmer organization with our technical unit, conservation farming unit, for about 20 years now. So, as you can see, like any other agricultural intervention, it's not more like an instant coffee thing. It takes a bit of time and you need people with partial diehands, otherwise by the wayside some people would lose faith. I've already said that we started with very small numbers of small scale farmers, but now we are upscaling and also moving from what we started as conservation farming towards conservation agriculture, consolidating the gains in productivity and also becoming more conscious about the environment as the climate change concerns are becoming more and more vivid. So, our target now is by 2015 to have around about 350,000 small order farming farms practicing conservation agriculture. As you're going to see, we have already a good number of those practicing conservation farming now. And the good news is, finally, this was all the private sector-led initiative until about last year when we saw government, the public extension wing coming on board and they have received funding and taken it by expertise from FAO. And they've started a program which is trying to bring on board an additional 250,000 small order farms, meaning we are going to have around about half a million to about 600,000 small orders practicing conservation agriculture by 2015. Before I go into conservation agriculture, I think the most important thing is to give you a brief about summer year. We've got about 75.3 million hectares of land, out of which 9 million hectares of arable land would go to moderate potential for cropping. About 20 million of that is also good for last year. Only 1.5 million hectares of the 9 million is actually cropped at the moment and we have around about 1.2 million small order families of the rural combination. And with 15 to 18 persons per square kilometer density in rural areas. So this tells us that most of our small scale orders are very confident about a hectare, a hectare to two. And then we only have about 600 commercial farmers who are the ones who command over a thousand hectares of cropping and maybe three to four thousand hectares under grazing. And we have about 100,000 imaging farmers, they're in between, those they command between 20 to about 40 hectares of cropping. They only give it time. But the 1.2 million farming households are mostly dry land production. They depend on rent. So between 25 and 40 percent of the maize planted, maize being the dominant crop for our small orders, is unfortunately abandoned by the small order farmers. So over the eight years from 2000 to 2008, we saw about 1.7 million hectares of maize which was initially planted being abandoned. And the average yield, like Dennis said, you wouldn't believe it, but they range about 1 to 1.5 times per hectare. This is the national average on the rain-fed maize. You're talking of the family of an average household size of 6 to 80, producing about a ton of maize, 365 days with maybe a little bit more livestock. So you can imagine why the world records that huge number of COVID stricken families. And then during the same period, 73 percent of our small orders didn't sell any maize at all. It means they were not producing enough to eat. And 67 percent of our small orders didn't use fertilizer. Fertilizer being a landlocked country in Zambia is at a very high cost. And this brings in the issue of most of them not affording. And 80 percent of the surplus production actually came from a few productive small orders, which is just about 10 percent. So we have a situation where we have more productivity amongst small-scale farmers. And this is what we're trying to change is we promote conservation farming and conservation agriculture. As a country, we've got three major ecological zones. The upper one is our high rainfall area. We receive around 1,200 millimeters with good forest. And then the middle one, the green and the pale, the lime green. That's our region two. That is what gives us about 8 to 850 millimeters of rain. And the lower one is normally in the drought stricken area. So our conservation farming promotion is from the region two, A, going down to region one. Because this is again where we have the challenges of obvious weather conditions. And with climate change effects manifesting, this is where we feel the heat. And that is where we've concentrated on promoting our conservation farming. Other challenges, which our small order farmers face, the lifestyle diseases, where we now have very few households affording animal drought power. And also we have the damaging effects of conventional tillage, which has become more like a norm. Those are some of the conventional methods which you find. We still have a slush and ban. And that is all very destructive to our souls. And the other side, that's the traditional way of plowing. And that doesn't afford our farmers time to plant early. And those are the effects, for instance, when we have heavy downpots. We have gullies here. A lot of erosion, tons and tons of soil is being removed away by erosion, surface erosion. And because of our continuous plowing, we have graded hard pans such that within one heavy downpour, again we have problems of water logging. So those are some of the actually drivers of poor productivity among our farmers. We have also poor crop establishment for instance, as a result of our traditional way of farming. And also very late plowing, because some people have to wait for either higher drought power. Now that just works to lock up nitrogen, missing out on the nitrogen flush, and the crops don't really perform. Now, in starting filling the effects of the climate change, the other year we had prolonged dry spells. And in traditionally converted crop, where crop establishment was already poor, we have a hard plan. Runoffs and the crop couldn't go anywhere. And the other side, the crop also is drying. And just within 10 to 15 days of dry spell. So those are things which are forcing us to promote conservation farming and conservation agriculture. Now what we mean by conservation farming, this is where we promote dryland land preparation with minimum tillage. You could data use a whole oxen or tractor. For oxen and tractor we use rip lines and make them permanent planting stations. And we have many more destabots of the soil. And then we promote residual retention and we are planting and applying fertilizer in those fixed plant stations. And we have brought in a good crop rotation regime, which is also helping to maximize soil fertility. And now as more is scaling up, this is where we've started the promotion of planting the archesis, so that we move to the next level. Those are some of the things we're doing. For handful farmers, we do planting messes on the other side and this is how the crop comes out during the rain season. So we have food legumes and cereal kind of combination. And that already is going to see with our results how we are performing. For farmers with oxen, that is what we're trying to do. We have rip lines in between the archesis and then we plant the same combination of cowpea, soya, ground and maize. And this is what you see that the analogy Dennis mentioned, when the crop is nearly growing during the rain season, the archesis actually have no leaves at all. And the other side, that is a 10-year-old crop of archesis planted and in that field we have actually about 96. We only lost because we were able to fence it up, we only lost about four of them. In about five years, this farmer will be actually trying to retune some of the crops so that we don't have all messed up. We've been also doing some trials which we've been following for years now just to make sure we see the effect of the archesis on our yields. And mostly those are the results. We've seen beautiful results. I'm going to show you where we have managed to increase for handball farmers by year three. We've moved them from an average of two tons per hectare to 5.6 tons per hectare. And then the farmers with oxen, ADB farmers, they've moved to about 7 tons per hectare of maize and about 2.5 tons per hectare of soya bean. Now the area also has increased for the farmers with oxen. They are now able within the optimal planting period to quickly plant about 5 hectares of maize and about 2 to 3 hectares of soya bean. Handball, they've remained around about averaging 2 hectares and they're able to get those yields. Over years, I think from the moment you have some practicing conservation farming, about three years, we have seen a 25 to 100% increase. Some in year one depending on the initial starting point of soya fertility in terms of maize yields. But really the major reasons for these productivity increases is the land preparation. Like I said, the lower side of Zambia has short rate for periods and also even the valley is drought prone. So the first thing we do is to allow our farmers to prepare their land in dry season. That gives them opportunity to plant within the optimum window. And we also have our precess and targeted application of seeds, nutrients and lime. That's another very critical ingredient we put into our cocktail, limey, because most of our soils are acidic and you would be amazed what lime can do to yields.