Our project partners have interviewed more than 500 farmers across Morocco, Spain and Tunisia, to investigate concepts that farmers associate with soil, perceptions of tillage and how social cultural factors – like tradition, community integration, adaptive capacity and perceived responsibility– relate to the choice of farming methods. The data gives insight in how farmers across the Mediterranean perceive and relate to soil, from which recommendations to increase the uptake conservation agriculture (CA) in the region can be derived.

In February 2023 a group of researchers of the project team of ConServeTerra met in Morocco to visit the experimental sites in Morocco (Figure 1). A major part of the project relies on field experiments on experimental stations and local farms to gain insights on certain Conservation Agriculture (CA) practices on soil quality and crop productivity.

After one year of collaboration, a first Annual Meeting with all project partners was scheduled from 2nd to 5th November 2021 in Marrakesh, Morocco.  Due to Covid-restrictions the meeting had to be reorganized and was held as an online event. The project stakeholders made the best of it anyway and shared ideas to improve the project further.