Legumes have many benefits for smallholder farmers in the mixed crop livestock systems that dominate Africa and Asia. They are widely grown by farmers but often not to their potential. This is partly because advisory services and projects promote legumes in a piecemeal way without a systems understanding of farmer needs and the various benefits legumes offer. Legume CHOICE is a systematic approach to defining the various legume options available and prioritizing them for particular communities.
LegumeCHOICE is a participatory tool to fit multi-purpose legumes to appropriate niches in mixed crop-livestock farming systems. It is a participatory approach to making informed decisions, with farmers, about which legume types and species would be most appropriate to meet their livelihood needs. The simple concept underlying the tool is that different legume types fulfil different functions within farms and that by matching legume types with the functions demanded by farmers a sensible set of legume options can be tested and refined at farm level.
Legume CHOICE consists of a list of legume options including grain legumes, forage legumes and multi-purpose trees. Each option is scored for its contribution to various farm functions (e.g. food, feed, soil fertility) as well as its requirements for resources such as labour, land and inputs. Finally, each legume is scored for suitability to different agro-ecologies. The legumeCHOICE approach involves dialogue with farmers to understand what they want from legumes and what resources they have at their disposal.
This documentation is designed to help users of the legumeCHOICE application developed in 2021. It provides detailed guidance on using the app, using the data made available from the app, managing projects as an administrator, and developing further features for the application.
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 3 :caption: Overview source/using-the-guide.md
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 3 :caption: Data Collectors source/legume-choice-app.md source/focus-group.rst
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 3 :caption: Researchers source/public-data.md
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 3 :caption: Administrators source/administrators.md
.. toctree:: :maxdepth: 3 :caption: Developers source/developer-overview.md source/front-end.md source/database.md source/data-processing.md source/api.md source/nginx.md source/contribute-to-the-guide.md source/key-vm-commands.md