The aim of the Automar project (transfer and adaptatation of agro-ecological practices aimed at boosting the autonomy of market gardeners and crop safety in sub-Saharan Africa - 2017-2019) is to work with producers in Senegal and Tanzania to build intensive, sustainable cropping systems that make farms more autonomous by combining agro-ecological practices based in particular on using endogenous biological resources (cleansing plants to control plant-eating nematodes and beneficial native micro-organisms to restore the health of fragile soils exhausted by intensive market gardening) and insect netting.

Innovations were chosen for their broad scope for implementation and their flexibility in terms of adaptation to varying contexts (eg functional complementarity of micro-organisms and suitability to local biotic and abiotic conditions, hardy cleansing plants against a very broad-spectrum soil parasite that affects 80% of market garden species, netting mesh size and shape). These innovations are intended to cut field losses, boost yields and improve soils, cut input costs (local production of input substitutes, netting that can be re-used for four years). They are supposed to be accessible (local seeds and micro-organisms), reproducible (simple techniques already adopted in other tropical zones) and suitable for use be beneficiaries either "à la carte" or combined.

In practical terms, the aim is to work with existing innovation platforms in the two countries to adapt and pre-disseminate combinations of "multi-ecosystem-service" innovations already tested in other tropical zones that can be reproduced independently by farmers. In addition to "technical" work to adapt the innovations tested to local conditions, the approach will also include an ex-ante adoptability survey of producers to determine their constraints as regards the technical pathways concerned and their perception of the autonomy gained in relation to their current cropping systems, which are highly dependent on inputs from elsewhere. Alongside this work, experiments taking account of the potential constraints on adoption will serve to assess the efficacy and cost-effectiveness (cost-benefit analysis) of these innovations.

The planned work is by necessity multi-discplinary, associating agronomists, ecologists and soil microbiologists or agronomists, entomologists and economists to work on shared experiments. Automar is a collaborative project associating researchers from CIRAD, the IRD and INRA (France), ISRA and the UGB (Senegal), WorldVeg (Tanzania) and the IIPFIH (Cuba). The results are due in September 2019. The project is funded by the CIRAD/INRA GloFoods metaprogramme.