Soil Best Bets Compendium

The Soil Best Bets Compendium is an online collection of solutions, such as Climate Smart Agriculture and Rotational Livestock Kraaling, for maintaining or increasing soil organic matter and soil fertility.

Each of the best bets in the Compendium, a mix of technologies, methods, practices and initiatives, is explained in detail.  Information on the geographical cover and most relevant agro-ecosystem for each of them is also provided.

The Compendium can be explored using key word searches or resource requirement score filtering to identify the most appropriate solution to a given situation and context. 

Each best bet is evaluated on an impact scale of -2 to +2 according to its:

• Resource Requirements
• Tradeoffs
• Effectiveness
• Risks
• Framework Conditions
• Attractiveness
• and Cross Cutting relevance (in consideration of biodiversity, climate change adaptation, mitigation, gender and participation)

Resource requirements are further identified as: organic inputs; inorganic inputs; land, land tenure; labor; money, cash, loan; time; machinery, animal draft, other tools; market demand; or others. These are given a score from 1 to 10 (0=does not apply, 1=very little impact, 10=very high impact) representing the probability that an absence or excess of the required resource risks the overall success of the best bet.

This tool is open access and available for use by governments, non-government organizations, researchers, communities, and others. It was developed by researchers from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) with support from the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, GIZ.