In recent years, the agricultural industry has been experiencing an ever-increasing application of information and communication technologies globally. This new revolution has been touted to impact efficiency and productivity in the agricultural extension services within the agriculture sector. Notwithstanding this, empirical research need to be carried out amongst its users in the sector to ascertain these assertions.
Evaluation provides effective feedback for development plans and programs. In this respect, it is of utmost importance to ensure that the outputs of agricultural extension and education projects are compatible with the ones expected. Therefore, the main purpose of this study was to evaluate agricultural extension model sites approach from actors’ perspectives and to analyze their gaps via the context, input, process, and product (CIPP) evaluation model.
The creation of commercialization opportunities for smallholder farmers has taken primacy on the development agenda of many developing countries. Invariably, most of the smallholders are less productive than commercial farmers and continue to lag in commercialization. Apart from the various multifaceted challenges which smallholder farmers face, limited access to extension services stands as the underlying constraint to their sustainability.
ICT-driven digital tools to support smallholder farmers are arguably inevitable for agricultural development, and they are gradually evolving with promising outlook. Yet, the development and delivery of these tools to target users are often fraught with non-trivial, and sometimes unanticipated, contextual realities that can make or mar their adoption and sustainability. This article unfolds the experiential learnings from a digital innovation project focusing on surveillance and control of a major banana disease in East Africa which is being piloted in Rwanda.
Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) proposes environmental policies developed around action-based conservation measures supported by agri-environment schemes (AES). High Nature Value (HNV) farming represents a combination of low-intensity and mosaic practices mostly developed in agricultural marginalized rural areas which sustain rich biodiversity. Being threatened by intensification and abandonment, such farming practices were supported in the last CAP periods by targeted AES.
Due to the increasing gap between input costs and the final prices they receive for their produce, Indian farmers have been increasingly affected by the current agrarian crisis. It is within this context that Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) - a farming method promising low to zero input costs - has been gaining momentum.
The study was conducted in Thakurgaon sadar Upazila to determine farmers’ perception of the extent and factors of ICTs effectiveness in transferring farming information. A total of 250 people who were already been taken services from different ICT center was selected as sample respondents following a random sampling technique. Primary data were collected using a predesigned interview schedule.
A central concern about achieving global food security is reconfiguring agri-food systems towards sustainability. However, historically-informed trajectories of agri-food system development remain resistant to a change in direction. Through a systematic literature review, the authors identify three research domains exploring this phenomenon and six explanations of resistance: embedded nature of technologies, misaligned institutional settings, individual attitudes, political economy factors, infrastructural rigidities, research and innovation priorities.
The Newsletter of the Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP) provides regular updates on activities by TAP and its partners, on the projects and on upcoming events. This issue specifically refers to the period from August to October 2021.
Two major agricultural transformations are currently being promoted worldwide: digitalisation and ecologisation, that include different practices such as organic farming and sustainable intensification. In literature and in societal debates, these two transformations are sometimes described as antagonistic and sometimes as convergent but are rarely studied together. Using an innovation system approach, this paper discusses how diverse ecologisation pathways grasp digitalisation in the French agricultural sector; and do not discriminate against organic farming.