Save and Grow in practice: maize, rice, wheat. A guide to sustainable cereal production

Published on 18 January 2016, this FAO book considers how the world's major cereals maize, rice and wheat - which together account for an estimated 42.5% of human calories and 37% of human protein - can be grown in ways that respect and even leverage natural ecosystems. Drawing on case studies, the book shows how the "Save and Grow" approach to agriculture advocated by FAO is already being successfully employed to produce staple grains, pointing the way to a more sustainable future for farming and offering practical guidance on how the world can pursue its new sustainable development agenda. Viable Save and Grow practices range from growing shade trees that shed their leaves when adjacent maize crops most need sunlight, as tried with success in Malawi and Zambia, to scrapping tillage and leaving crop residues as soil surface mulch, a method applied on a massive scale by wheat farmers on the Kazakhstani steppe and increasingly by innovative slash-and-mulch practices adopted by farmers in the highlands of Central and South America.