This presentation for the Third Global Conference on Agricultural Research for Development (GCARD3,Johannesburg, South Africa, 5-8 April 2016) illustrates the topic of competitiveness in Africa smallholders system, focusing on the Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) and Agricultural Innovation Systems (AIS) concepts and on the role of the innovation platforms.
At the 5th Global Science Conference on Climate-Smart Agriculture in Bali, CCAFS, IFAD and USDA-FAS organized the Side event “Accelerating innovation development and scaling climate-smart agriculture to drive a transformation in food systems”. High-level representatives of > 20 governments, research, donor, financial and policy institutions, civil society and private sectors discussed their previously shared insights and agreed to act as an “Insight Group” for further related CCAFS research and action.
This research aims to add to the literature new insights about the interaction processes, which are implemented in different interactive extension approaches, by analysing how farmers attending different extension events shape a network of indirect interactions
Indicator-based tools are widely used for the assessment of farm sustainability, but analysts still face methodological and conceptual issues, including data availability, the complexity of the concept of sustainability and the heterogeneity of agricultural systems. This study contributes to this debate through the illustration of a procedure for farm sustainability assessment focussed on the case study of the South Milan Agricultural Park, Italy. The application is based on a set of environmental, social and economic indicators retrieved from the literature review.
The level of agricultural productivity in Sub-Saharan Africa remains far below the global average. This is partly due to the scarce use of production- and process-enhancing technologies. This study aims to explore the driving forces and effects of adopting innovative agricultural technologies in food value chains (FVC). These enhancing FVC technologies are referred to as upgrading strategies (UPS) and are designed to improve specific aspects of crop production, postharvest processing, market interaction, and consumption.
Several posters have been created on the occasion of the 5th TAP Partners Assembly (Laos, 20-22 September 2017) to show recent activities and achievements in the eight pilot countries of the CDAIS project.
The Farmer Field School (FFS) approach has been very successful and witnessed a strong expansion in many areas beyond crop production. Notwithstanding this success, the adoption of FFS in national extension often remains problematic and FFS activities have often been implemented in the margin of national institutions with strong reliance on donor funding. The creation of an enabling environment for institutional support is essential for expanding the effort, improving quality, and strengthening impact and continuity of the FFSs.
This article conceptualizes the diffusion of user innovations from a service ecosystem perspective. With the focus on sustainable innovations, the service ecosystem is evaluated, along with other systemic innovation concepts, as a possible theoretical basis for explaining the first adoption and diffusion of user innovations.
The Colombian Ministry of Agriculture Colombia, an international research center and a national farmers’ organization developed a data-driven agricultural program that: (i) compiles information from multiple sources; (ii) interprets that data; and (iii) presents the knowledge to farmers through the local advisory services. Data was collected from multiple sources, including small-scale farmers. Machine learning algorithms combined with expert opinion defined how variation in weather, soils and management practices interact and affect maize yield of small-scale farmers.
While there is a lot of literature from a natural or technical sciences perspective on different forms of digitalization in agriculture (big data, internet of things, augmented reality, robotics, sensors, 3D printing, system integration, ubiquitous connectivity, artificial intelligence, digital twins, and blockchain among others), social science researchers have recently started investigating different aspects of digital agriculture in relation to farm production systems, value chains and food systems. This has led to a burgeoning but scattered social science body of literature.