Legume integration in smallholder farming systems for food security and resilience to climate change

PLOS One | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0327727 August 13, 2025 13 / 20 sufficient food to feed the household. The pick of the food shortage was reached in May and thereafter started to sharply drop, since the respondents begun harvesting of vegetables and early maturing crops like legumes such as common beans in June, the end of Belg season. In the region, two distinct rainy seasons such as Meher and Belg are wet seasons, allowing the farmers to produce twice a year. Meher allows the farmers to grow crops from July to September and harvest in October while Belg allows crop to grow from March to June. Given those conditions, farmers had sufficient food from July to January, but their farm produce was not sufficient to use in the drier months (Fig 5). Discussions As Sub-Saharan, the country’s economy depends on agriculture [30]. Since the country’s food production potential did not fulfill domestic demand, it imports a huge amount of food and industrial products that cost billions of dollars. It covers the costs from international donations, remittances, and domestic revenues. To fulfill its food production for self-sufficiency, the country has started massively transforming its agriculture, adopting several new agricultural practices and innovative technologies. Several universities and agricultural research centers have been playing a vital role in adopting and intro- ducing new and innovative agricultural technologies into the country [31]. Rhizobium inoculant technology is one of such

agricultural technologies being effectively used in in other countries, but poorly used in Ethiopia [32], particularly in south- ern Ethiopia. To adopt and use the rhizobium-inoculant technology in smallholder farmers’ fields, this study was initiated to generate data for measuring the performance of households, farming and management practices, and vulnerability to climate change and legume production potential. It further wanted to generate first-hand information on the farmer’s liveli- hood and their willingness to adopt the modern technologies like biofertilizers for future interventions. Accordingly, survey data were collected in the regions and described household characteristics, farm variability, agricultural practices, farm problems, climate factors and interest of the farmers towards adopting the rhizobia inoculant technologies. Farm variability across the study area Farm variability refers to the variations in soil composition, crop types, agricultural practices, pest infestations, plant varieties, altitude, soil moisture, soil nutrient levels and harvest outputs from farms within a specific spatial and temporal context. The region’s farming systems were distinguished by significant crop-livestock farming systems with high crop diversification and livestock holding. The diverse agro-ecological settings provide for a variety of farming and livelihood systems [34]. Drought, one of the region’s climatic factors, has been identified as a significant impediment to people’s

cropping preferences [36]. Farmers plant a mix of co-staples and annual crops to meet their nutritional needs, and they frequently incorporate income crops [28]. As a result, these farms are mixed subsistence agricultural systems that provide significant self-reliance and long-term existence for these populations [35]. As a result, in the research region, the reali- zation of subsistence systems focused on the extensive cultivation of Enset-Coffee-Khat dominant agroforestry cropping systems throughout the highlands, while maize and sorghum combined with common bean production systems were common in the low and midlands. Land fragmentation is the growing of crops on disconnected smaller plots [34]. It is more prevalent in the research area, particularly in places with high and medium altitudes, where population growth is high. It is seen as a top concern, and hence its influence has been seen through the lens of farm efficiency and economies of scale [35]. According to CSA [9] and Belay et al. [35], the population boom, customary land inheritance regulations, and farmers’ usufruct rights are projected to contribute to increased fragmentation. This suggests that the farms they inherit become incredibly small- scale operations that are incapable of becoming productive even with intensification, and certainly not sufficient for the extension programs that primarily focus on technology diffusion to address the problems of rural poverty. Reduced land size led to considerable reductions in yields of the key crops on which the population relies for food and livelihood security

(S7 Fig). Even after a single farming season, respondents revealed that yield reductions fell below their household feed requirements. Because of this, small farm fields did not yield as much, while the fields were farmed on a continual basis