The main objective of ILRI's Sustainable Production Systems Programme is to improve human welfare through the development of more productive and Sustainable crop-livestock sytems in developing countries. The programmes' focus is on market-oriented smallholder crop-livestock systems. In order to improve the productivity and sustainability of these systems, biological, environmental and socio-economic constraints have to be overcome. Therefore, opportunities for changing the systems in a sustainable manner have to be carefully identified and chosen.

The manual was created specifically for use in the Western Kenya Smallholder Agricultural Carbon project, managed by the Swedish NGO Vi Agroforestry, which is the test case for the first Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS) methodology for generating carbon credits by building organic matter in agricultural soils. The project aims to provide support to farmers as they implement the sustainable agricultural and management (SALM) practices which generate the carbon credits within the project.