Tied Ridges and Better Cotton Breeds for Climate Change Adaptation

Climate change and variability is already reducing agricultural productivity and opportunities for employment, pushing up food prices and affecting food availability and production of formerly adapted crop types. Such is the case in cotton production in Zimbabwe, where it was the only viable commercial crop in marginal areas. As a form of adaptation, there is need for African farmers to have a range of agricultural techniques as coping strategies and tactics to enable sustainable production of crops and deal with extreme events. Such techniques include water conservation and introduction of new adapted crop genetics to cope with the new environment. The emerging trends in climate change will force farmers to adopt new crops and varieties and forms of agricultural production technologies. The objective of this study is to determine the contribution of combining in-field water harvesting and early maturing cotton varieties in curbing drought in cotton in semiarid Zimbabwe. The results show that both water harvesting in form of planting basins significantly (P <0.05) increased boll number and branch number of cotton across all varieties. The varieties M577 and M567 out-performed the conventional varieties in early growth, branch number, and boll number. Tied contour ridges gave a significantly (P <0.05) higher moisture content in 0–5 cm and the 6–10 cm depth compared to conventional tillage. The new varieties displayed early phenological development. Despite the existence of rainfall gaps, the in-field water harvesting techniques captured enough moisture and prevented moisture losses through runoff which resulted successful flowering and fruiting in the short varieties compared to conventional tillage on conventional varieties. In this regard, water harvesting and early maturing varieties offer considerable hope for increasing crop production in arid and semiarid areas of Zimbabwe.