Study site description: Sehoul, Morocco

Table of Contents

1. General information
2. Bio-physical description
3. Land and resource use
   1. Land use practice in cultivated areas
   2. Water resources
   3. Forest resources
   4. Strengths of existing land use practices
   5. Weaknesses of existing land use practices
   6. Major degradation issues
   7. Experimental results
4. Socio-economic description
5. Institutional and political setting
6. Relevant end-users / stakeholder groups
7. Past and on-going projects

Land use practice in cultivated areas

Two types of practices concern the cultivated areas

• Some practices are inherited and persist namely on the plateau margins. They consist of traditional soil use, inside long and narrow plots, along the slope. Winter cereals dominate, replaced in some very small plots by spring grains, as corn and beans. Ploughing is manual and the use of fertilizers very rare. The income is very low and the stubbles are grazed. The fallow fields occupy some rare surfaces and are grazed in winter and spring.
• Other practices are specific for the flat parts of the plateau, on the best soils, in plots which were occupied by the former colonisation or were bought by urban owners. Irrigation is the first indicator of intensification. It is related to groundwater pumping. The plots are wider and better maintained. Cultivation is generally mechanised and fertilisation normally practiced.

Due to the extension of cultivated lands on slopes, even on the steepest ones, the grazing areas outside the forest are very rare (less than 12% of the commune area). But nowadays soils degraded by rills and gullies on the private fields, which were cultivated over a long period, seem to be abandoned and become pasture area, with very weak fodder possibilities however.

Transformations

• The speed of transformation is quite low in the hilly parts, while it is much more rapid on the plateau, where new farms are continuously established in relation with urban investments.
• There is not a uniform trend. Some grazing areas are transformed into cultivated fields. And conversely, degraded cultivated fields are abandoned and become grazing lands.
• There is an important tendency to erect fences around the farms, either metallic or vegetative ones (use of cypress trees in the modern farms, or cactus opuntia, more generally) and these fences play an important role in term of overland flow. In the fields with fences, intensified agriculture is now done with some irrigation and good soil management against runoff and erosion.