The year 2023 will likely be the hottest ever recorded on our planet. Adapting to climate change and climate extremes is increasingly becoming a day-to-day concern for African farmers, along with food security and income issues. Agricultural adaptations like varietal choice and fertilizer doses have deserved great attention from the crop modeling community, and are overall well accounted for by crop models. Agroecological practices, for example residue mulching, rotation and intercropping with legumes and application of organic amendments offer great potential to adapt to climate change. Yet, they have deserved less attention when it comes to the modeling of their performance in tropical context. In this abstract, we describe a collective research effort to update and test the Stics soil-crop model to account for the impact of agroecological practices on cropping system performance in the tropics. We built on multiple years of measurements in contrasting experimental sites from cool to warm, semi-arid to sub-humid subtropical environments, in Senegal, Zimbabwe, Mali, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Brazil and Madagascar. We assessed the skills and pitfalls of the model to simulate i) new cereal and legume crops ii) cereal-legume intercropping, iii) crop residue decomposition and feedbacks on crop growth and iv) crop residue mulching. We calibrated a new set of parameters for tropical maize (Falconnier et al., 2020), sorghum (Traoré et al., 2022, Ganeme et al., in revision), millet (Sow et al., forthcoming), rice (Ranaivoson et al., 2022), and legumes like cowpea (Traoré et al., 2022, Ganeme et al., in revision) and groundnut (Civil, 2022). Model accuracy (rRMSE) for end-of-season variables like aboveground biomass and grain yield was in the range of 20 to 50%. The scrutiny of in-season soil water and plant leaf area index (LAI) indicated that water stress was often underestimated, possibly because of underestimation of soil evaporation, and underestimation of the impact of wat