On the 21st of June 2021 together with our partners from Stichting Boerengroep, Agroecology Europe organised a webinar on ‘Pathways for drought resilient agroecological systems’.
With longer and more frequent heatwaves and more sporadic and intense rainfall, we will need to produce food on much dryer land in the future. In different parts of the world, agricultural land has been becoming increasingly dry.
In this webinar, it is explored how we can create drought-resilient cropping systems. How do we make crops more resilient to drought, while keeping in mind the agroecological principles? The two speakers, Joost Sleiderink from Louis Bolk Institute and Silvia Quarta from Ecosystem Restoration Camp Altiplano, shared their ideas and solutions from two different perspectives – specifically from a crop and crop combination perspective and from a broad landscape perspective.
Joost Sleiderink: Joost is a Wageningen University alumnus and now works at the Louis Bolk Institute as a Junior Researcher Sustainable Livestock Farming and Agrobiodiversity. As part of his Master in Agroecology, he did research on ‘’Deep rooting and Perennial grain crops’’ in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen. This is the topic he will discuss with us in the relation to intercropping as a way of coping with drought.
Silvia Quarta: Silvia studied Environmental Sciences in Wageningen and then moved to Spain to work on different restoration projects. She spent a year at Sunseed Desert Technologies working with native species for reforestation in drylands and has been now working at Camp Altiplano for more than a year. She will talk about what they did to restore the soil and combat drought, from a more landscape perspective.
Together with the speakers, Agroecology Europe and its Dutch team discussed different visions and how to combine or select the right solutions.