**Acknowledgements**

(Santarém, Pará). The participants manifested interest in installing new units of the IrrigaPot project because they learned how rainfall could be used in agriculture during the dry months from August to November. The clay pots are maintained in the soil with 20 l of water and are able to meet plant water needs. It is important to emphasize that the use of rainfall waters reduced the blue water footprint of agriculture, because all the water used in irrigation comes from water that is stored during high-rainfall months in areas that adopt

Using this process of collective learning, seminars were given wherein the fundamental techniques of irrigation with clay pots were presented in the DUs. Among the 150 participants in these activities, which were conducted in Altônia, in the northeast of the State of Paraná, the majority of them demonstrated interest in using this technology in their properties, but the largest barrier to this was established as the fabrication of the clay pots. This collective learning activity heightened the awareness of farmers of the importance of the adoption of this technology as a strategy for the sustainable cultivation of crops through replacement of water

• The technology was found to be economically viable under conditions of small-scale growers, demonstrating the success of sharing scientific knowledge from the Brazil/Africa partnership. • The sharing of knowledge about the IrrigaPot technology motivated agricultural producers from different regions of Brazil to adopt this technology as a strategy that promotes a proenvironment vision and that can bring social-cultural transformation with respect to the

• The partnership between the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa Amazônia Oriental), and the University of Makelle, da Ethiopia/Africa, with the incentive of the Program for Agricultural Innovation MarketPlace, integrated diverse specialists from Brazilian, African, Latin American, and Caribbean institutions in order to promote research projects and agricultural innovation and yielded successful results with the

• This technology has gained the attention and interest of agricultural producers in different regions of Brazil and in neighboring countries, and also in Africa. These producers have installed the IrrigaPot system in different scales in diverse arrangements such as agroforests, and fruit and vegetable gardens, and have even adapted the system by modifying the

• Society in general has increased pressure on governments and regulating agencies in order to provide incentive to agricultural producers to produce using with less irrigation water with the goal of reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture, principally the blue water footprint, and the IrrigaPot technology represents a sustainable practice for the sus-

to soil during dry periods in order to guarantee production [17].

use of water resources in family-based agriculture.

the IrrigaPot technology.

86 Soil Moisture

**4. Conclusions**

IrrigaPot project.

type of clay pots.

tainable replacement of soil water.

The authors would like to thank the MKTPlace Project and CNPq (Brazilian National Research Council) for financial support.
