Managing the fallow: Weeding technology and environmental knowledge in the Krobo district of Ghana

The paper explores the relationship between environmental knowledge and farming and fallowing strategies on degraded forest land in the Upper Manya Krobo district of southeastern Ghana. Changes in cropping strategies are related to the expansion and transformation of frontier agrarian settlement, increasing population density, social differentiation, and land hunger. As a consequence land degradation has become a serious problem among the smaller farmers with insufficient land to allow fallow recuperation. Small farmers' awareness and perceptions of the processes of degradation are explored, as are possible innovative contributions to the development of agroforestry research. But labor constraints often prevent the farmer from developing practical systems of fallow management. Local environmental knowledge reveals important insights into the processes of fallow degradation, potentials for fallow management, constraints that farmers face, and some problems that might emerge with the transformation of current agroforestry technology to farmers' fields. It is suggested that this knowledge should not be abstracted from its socio-economic context. The problems that local farmers' knowledge reveal are in this respect as important as questions of its efficacy and potential as a resource. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 1991