Burkina Faso’s women farmers reviving the land with fertiliser trees

With her daba in hand, her back bent from decades in the fields, Maan — meaning “grandmother” in the local Nuni language of Burkina Faso’s Centre-Ouest region — isn’t ready to put down her hoe just yet.

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On this July afternoon, as the sun blazes overhead, the septuagenarian works cheerfully alongside her eight-year-old grandson, weeding her plot near Cassou, a rural commune of some 54,000 inhabitants where she was born.

The 2-hectare (5-acre) plot, which Maan Alima Tagnan inherited from her late husband, sustains her small family. For years, she has cultivated a mix of crops here. What draws the eye, however, is the unusual layout: carefully spaced rows of young trees alternating with mature ones, thriving among cowpeas, millet and other crops now nearing harvest.

This is agroforestry polyculture using “fertiliser trees,” an ancestral technique that the Association for the Promotion of Fertiliser Trees, Agroforestry and Forestry (APAF) has revived and modernised by introducing new varieties of nitrogen-fixing trees.

"We haven't invented anything — it’s nothing new to plant trees in fields to enrich the soil,” Firmin Hien, Deputy Executive Director of APAF-Burkina Faso, tells Mongabay. “Our parents used to do it, too, but people abandoned the practice with the arrival of chemical fertilisers.”

His remarks are echoed by Cheick Zouré, a specialist in the rehabilitation of degraded ecosystems at Joseph Ki-Zerbo University in Burkina Faso. He says research shows these trees can improve soil quality by 30-60% by adding key nutrients, notably nitrogen nodules, potassium and phosphorus.