The chagga home garden and their practices. A paper review presentation.

1. Chagga Home Garden
A Tribal Climate-Smart Agriculture System
Mount Kilimanjaro I Northern Tanzania
Syed Zahid Hasan I MSc Student (Agroforestry) I SAU, Sylhet

2. Chagga Home Garden..
Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems
(GIAHS) recognizes the Chagga Home Garden as unique agricultural
sites, a nature-based solution that protects biodiversity and ensures
food security in a changing climate.
 The Chaggas are tribes of Northern Tanzania practices effective
land use management system, a form of agroforestry.
 They are skilled farmers with an intimate knowledge of multi-
storey arrangement of the crops and their ecological requirements.
 This type of cropping system helps to develop sustainable climate-
smart Agriculture.

3. Chagga Home Garden > Geographic Location..
 The Chagga home gardens are found on Mt.
Kilimanjaro in Northern Tanzania (2.9-3.3°S, 37.0-
37.5°E).
 By 1984, the Chagga home gardens were estimated
to cover 120,000 ha on the southern and eastern
slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro mainly between 900 and
1800 m above sea level.

4. Chagga Home Garden > Land Use Systems..
 Homesteads are densely scattered and food crops are grown under the canopies
of banana and coffee.
 Chagga involves integration of several multipurpose trees and shrubs with food
and cash crops and livestock simultaneously on the same unit of land.
The use of multipurpose trees/shrubs:
- to provide shade for coffee - as live fences.
- for fodder and mulch production.
- for bee forage - with anti-pest properties.
Figure 1: A typical Chagga home garden

5. Chagga Home Garden > Distribution of the Chagga home gardens..
Figure 2: Distribution of the Chagga home gardens on Northern Kilimanjaro based on a supervised classification
of Landsat ETM images taken on 29 January and 21 February 2000 (Hemp and Hemp, 2008)

6. Chagga Home Garden > Vegetation Systems..
Figure 3: Vegetation Systems
 Vegetation Profile (Top 27 x
2.5 m)
 Ground plan (27 x 5 m)
 Bold lines indicate the area
used for the profile of a
typical Chagga home garden

7. Chagga Home Garden > Growth form spectrum..
Figure 4: Growth form spectrum of the Chagga home gardens
(a) Species number of the
respective stratum in the
vegetation plots;
(b) Species number of all
representatives of a growth
form, e.g. of trees including
young trees occurring in the
shrub and herb layer ( Hemp,
2006)

8. Chagga Home Garden > Floristic composition..
a) Floristic composition of the banana fields
in respect of the different vegetation
formations on Kilimanjaro;
b) b) share of cultivated, neophytic and
indigenous plants in the Chagga home
gardens. (Hemp, 2006)

9. Chagga Home Garden > Components of the Home Garden..
Crops TreesandShrubs CashCrops Animal
Banana(Musaspp.) Albiziaschimperiana Coffee(Coffeaarabica) Cattle
Beans(Phaseolusvulgaris) Brideliamicrantha Cardamom(Elettariacardamomum) Goats
Cabbage(Brassicaoleracea) Caesalpiniadecapetala Fingermillet(Eleusinecoracana) Pigs
Cowpea(Vignaunguiculata) Calpurniaaurea
Maize(Zeamays) Caricapapaya
Onion(Alliumcepa) Cassiadidmyobotrya
Potato(Solanumtuberosum) CedrelaMexicana
Sweetpotato (lpomoeabatatas) Chlorophoraexcelsa
Saro (Colocassia spp. and
Xanthosomaspp.)
Citrusspp.
Tomato (Lycopersiconesculentum) Commiphoraspp.
Table 1: Components of the home garden

10. Chagga Home Garden > Typical vertical zonation..
Figure 6: Typical vertical zonation in a Chagga home garden
Plants Range of Clumps /
Homegarden
Intercropping
Crops
Banana 200 to 800 (330 to 1200ha -1) Taro, Yams and
Beans
Coffee 300 to 1000 (500 to 1400ha -1)
Table 2: Cropping practices

11. Chagga Home Garden > System Functioning..
 The average size of a home garden is 0.68ha with a range of 0.2 to 1.2ha.
 Planting, tending and harvesting of bananas, taro and yams occurs throughout
the year.
 Seeds are mostly obtained from previous crops.
 Dung from the stall-fed livestock and other household wastes are spread around
the banana clumps and coffee bushes.
 The Chagga use a variety of plant species with anti-pest properties.
 Each farmer keeps between 3 - 5 traditional bee-hives.
 Most of the Chagga farmers are almost self-sufficient in fodder production for
their livestock.
 Fuelwood production in home gardens is estimated to be between 1-2 m3 yr. -1
(1.5-3 m3 ha-1 yr-1).

12. Chagga Home Garden > Merits..
The continuous ground cover and high degree of nutrient
cycling are the major factors.
52% of Tanzania's export coffee comes from Chagga.
Represents a valuable gene pool for use in any breeding
programs to improve crop varieties for multistorey cropping
systems.
Soil conservation, nutrient cycling, nutrient efficiency,
microclimate enhancement and other benefits such as labor
efficiency, risk minimization and continuous production is
possible.

13. Chagga Home Garden > Weaknesses/Constraints..
Productivity is relatively low.
Absence of an integrated farming approach.
Steep slopes which prevent mechanization and require
substantial erosion control work.

14. Chagga Home Garden > Potentiality..
Replacing the less productive trees/shrubs with fast growing
nitrogen fixing species e.g., Leucaena leucocephala, Cauiandra
calothyrsus, Gliricidia sepium and Lespedeza bicolor.
Introducing new crop varieties using the gene pool developed
by natural and farmer selection

15. Chagga Home Garden > Conclusion..
The Chagga Home Gardens can be a role model for
Bangladesh also. It’s possible to reuse maximum fallow forest
area and taking them under multistoried agroforestry system
following Chagga Home Gardens to the hilly area of
Bangladesh.

16. Thank You