Abstract
Community-based Soil and Water Conservation (SWC) practices have been adopted in the Tigray region over the last four decades with the aim to rehabilitate the degraded lands. Nevertheless, studies addressing the types of SWC activities and its effects on soil fertility, crop yield improvement, socioeconomic role, soil erosion reduction and in general as climate smart agricultural practices were limited.
Thus, this study aimed to identify the major SWC activities and assess their implications on enhancing water availability, access to irrigation, improving soil fertility crop productivity and as climate smart agriculture practices. To achieve this objective household survey and focus group dissociation were employed with a total of 207 smallholder farmers who adopt. Further soil sample were taken for physicochemical analysis from soil and water conservation treated and non-treated fields at a depth of 0-15 and 15-30 cm using soil auger and cylindrical cores, respectively. Results revealed that all respondents were at the active age group 30-60 years, and the majority did not attend school. The result that implementing SWC activates has enhanced water availability, irrigation accessibility besides its positive role in soil fertility and crop productivity. Furthermore, the implementation of SWC activities creates the opportunity of earning more income to buy agricultural inputs and save money. This implies that the significant positive role of SWC activities for enhancing sustainable crop productivity without impairing the resource which are pillars of SWC activities as a means of climate-smart agriculture particularly in arid areas of Ethiopia. Government should be participated together with local peoples in SWC implementation. Climate smart agriculture Technologies practices in the study area are not practiced based on standard techniques. Further training for, DA’s on CSA Technologies is suggested.
Keywords: Climate smart agriculture, Crop production, Soil and water conservation, Soil erosion, Water storage structures,
