Vacant Position for MSc Dissertation: Maize and Wheat Agronomy

Tentative Title 1: Impact of agronomic practices on tree-crop facilitation in Wheat and Maize Farming Systems

Background

In many farming systems of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), food security is highly dependent on the performance of smallholder farming systems. Most of these farming systems are characterized by mixed tree-crop-livestock enterprises. These systems are currently under high threat from the impacts of climate change and they rarely meet food security objectives of the population. Their resilience to climate changes needs to be improved, while at the same time increasing the productivity of the systems. Scattered on-farm trees are considered among some of the approaches that improve the productivity of these systems and make them more resilient to climate change.   On the other hand, these trees also compete with crops for scarce resources such as soil nutrient and soil moisture.

In the current research, it is hypothesized that combining appropriate agronomic practices with on-farm trees will improve tree-crop facilitation and minimize competition. Different conservation agriculture (CA) practices (such as till or no till) will be combined with different Nitrogen and Phosphorus fertilizer rates in two sites of Central Rift Valley area of Ethiopia. The experiment will be carried out under an on-farm condition and in two sites. One site, Mojo, will be a Faidherbia-Wheat based farming system, while the other site, Alemtena (tentative), will be Faidherbia/Acacia-Maize based farming system.

Applicants who are doing their MSc in the following fields can apply.

•          Soil Sciences
•          Agroecology
•          Agronomy
•          Natural Resources Management
•          Environmental Sciences and other related fields

Interested applicants should send the following documents to (click here to apply) before February 20, 2014

•          A motivation letter
•          CV
•          Transcripts of BSc degree
•          Endorsement letter from MSc supervisor (optional)

Note: There will be limited finances available for operational costs during field work

 The field work will be carried out from the beginning of May 2014 to End of September 2014

For more details contact t.shiferaw@cgiar.org