Look to women for sustainable livestock farming bordering the Amazon rainforest, says study

When trees and livestock compete for land, the trees usually lose. It doesn't have to be this way. But centrally designed plans to implement tree-livestock coexistence in deforested areas don't always work on faraway farmland.

The ineffectiveness can be due to trying to accomplish too much too quickly. Transforming hundreds of thousands of hectares of treeless or degraded pastures into sustainable landscapes for livestock, nature and people should be a gradual, low-disruption process. And it should start with the people already quietly transforming small pieces of land—and those who want to.

In the southern Colombian department of Caquetá, which is recovering from decades of armed conflict and is now beset by reckless deforestation and the destructive forces of climate change, the people leading the change tend to be women, new research shows.

When women are in charge of the land (and only 15% of them were in the study), they are more likely than men to have silvopastoral livestock systems, where cattle meander through trees and eat plants grown on the landscape. Whether they manage the land or not, women are more willing to integrate nature into livestock farming.

"We found that women are more motivated to conserve the environment," said Augusto Castro, a researcher at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and the lead of the study published in Scientific Reports. "Additionally, they have a higher propensity to adopt silvopastoral systems."

Researchers collected data on more than 2,800 paddocks, which are small parcels of farmland for raising livestock. Along with gender-differentiated data, they collected socioeconomic information from farmers that pointed to several paradigm-challenging ways to incentivize the adoption of silvopastoral systems in conflict-affected settings in Colombia.

"We're still developing strategies to promote sustainable silvopastoral systems based on beliefs and not on facts," Castro said. "We need to use data from systematic studies to scale up silvopastoral systems successfully."

Know the landscape

Compared to degraded, mostly treeless pastures, silvopastoral farms are better for the environment: they reduce greenhouse gas emissions, store more carbon, diversify farm production, conserve biodiversity, and mitigate the negative impacts of weather extremes. They can also increase farm income.

While becoming globally more popular, silvopastoral uptake everywhere remains slow. Why?

In southern Colombia, one reason is a poor understanding of the incentives to adopt silvopastoral systems—and the integration of these incentives into policies and implementation. Another is economic: landscape transformation requires substantial investments of time and money before bottom lines start to improve. But access to finance is not necessarily the primary barrier to adoption: 56% of farmers surveyed have access to credit to invest in their farms.

"Just because you have the means to invest in silvopastoral systems doesn't mean you will do it," Castro said.

While women are more motivated than men to have trees on their farms for environmental reasons and to benefit future generations, it doesn't mean that men do not want trees on their farms; they just have different motivations. The study showed that men place a greater value than women on on-farm trees for future construction projects.