Agroecology and application in agriculture

Agroecology combines scientific inquiry with indigenous and community-based experimentation, emphasizing technology and innovations that are knowledge-intensive, low cost and readily adaptable by small and medium-scale producers. These methods are considered likely to advance social equity, sustainability and agricultural productivity over the long term. Collaborative structures that emphasize co-learning, social networks of innovation, and building capacity in flexible place-based decision-making have proven more effective than conventional top-down transfers of technology in the developing world. Partnerships that focus on inclusion and meaningful participation, particularly by historically marginalized groups, contribute to the design and implementation of solutions that are robust precisely because they are appropriate. Research has shown that peasant sys-tems, which mostly rely on local resources and complex cropping patterns, are reasonably productive despite their land endowments and low use of external inputs. Moreover analysis of ngo-led agro ecological initia-tives show that traditional crop and animal systems can be adapted to increase productivity by biological lyre-structuring peasant farms which in turn leads to optimization of key agro ecosystem processes (nutrient cycling, organic matter accumulation, biological pest regulation, etc.) andefficient use of labor and local resources. Examples of such grassroots projects are herein described to show that agro ecological approaches can offer opportunities to substantially increase food production while preserving the natural resource baseband empowering rural communities.