Proposals for appropriate adaptation of sorghum and maize cropping approaches to address climate variability and pedological constraints

Addressing climate variability in Sub-Saharan Africa and particularly in Burkina Faso is a big challenge. This article aimed at proposing cropping approaches for sorghum and maize to address climate variability and pedological constraints in Plateau Central region. The study was conducted on a sample of two hundred forty (240) maize and sorghum farmers were randomly selected. Data of socio-economic characterization of the farmers, their opinions on climate events, the commonly used adaptation methods and their recommendations were collected and process using the descriptive statistics. Concerning the process of building the resilient agriculture, the Clim Prospect method was also used. The results showed that only the combination of different methods can efficiently address the issues related to climatic variability and soil constraints. Therefore, three options of adaptation measures to climate variabilities taking to account farmer’s financial capacity were proposed. These approaches are the optimum, medium and minimum options. The decision-making to building the resilience of rain-fed agriculture must be based on recurrent diagnosis of the impacts and vulnerability for each case of a risk occurring. The investigations showed that crops production should shift from rainfed to irrigation. For reaching a percentage of population cereals need ≥ 120, support for maize and sorghum producers in the construction of water harvesting structures for supplementary irrigation, access to fertilizers, subsidies for production equipment, subsidies for agricultural inputs, the use of adapted seeds varieties and capacity building are essential.