Following the end of the civil war in 1986 refugee families began to return to their lands in the Murchison-Semliki region of Uganda that contain the last remaining natural forest in the country outside of protected areas. These riverside forests form corridors connecting the national parks and are vital habitat for chimpanzees. To feed their growing families farmers began to clear the forest to plant crops. Traditional agricultural practices quickly exhaust the soil and farmers are forced to deforest new areas. Between 2006 and 2010 WCS sound science showed that farmers were clearing nearly 8,000 ha of forest each year. Unless this changed the forest and its resident chimpanzee would soon disappear. In an attempt to avert this deforestation trend WCS joined forces with the Jane Goodall Institute and the Chimpanzee Trust. Initially we hoped that we could help farmers to capture the value of their trees by selling their stored carbon in the voluntary REDD+ market place. But the high cost of certifying the carbon for sale and the low price of forest carbon made this idea untenable. At WCS we adapted our plans and began offering farmers training in zero tillage farming that conserves nutrients and soil moisture, which is critical as rains become less predictable with climate change. Farmers who adopted the less capital intensive conservation farming methods saw their maize yields increase 2-fold and their net revenue by 15-fold. Today over 1000 farmers are using conservation farming technique that preserve soil fertility and crop productivity dramatically reducing the need to clear more forest. Analysis of forest cover change using the Global Forest Watch interactive mapper shows that deforestation has visibly declined in areas under conservation farming. In lila was forest before the start of the REDD+ project; in green the forest still today and although it is difficult to quantify a 1 to 1 cause and effect relationship it show that deforestation was a lot less where our Private Forest Owners/conservation farmers live.