Ethiopia is a home for diverse livestock including small ruminants and has the largest population of livestock in Africa. Livestock is kept for export earnings, food security, economic growth, poverty reduction and employment opportunities. Small ruminants are an important resource for livelihood and food security improvement serving as sources of food, income, risk mitigation, property security, monetary saving, investment, and providing other social and cultural benefits.
Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) and The Haller Foundation joined forces in 2016 when the UK based charity released version one of the Haller Farmers App.
The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) financed the second Cordillera Highland Agricultural Resource Management Project (CHARMP2), in areas where poverty is most severe among indigenous peoples in the highlands of the Cordillera Region in northern Philippines. The aim is to reduce poverty and improve the livelihoods of indigenous peoples living in farming communities in the mountainous project area. The indigenous peoples consist of many tribes whose main economic activity is agriculture.
The Establishment of the Rahad Scheme in Eastern Sudan in the 1970s established an agricultural innovation system where formal actors such as extension, research, finance institutions and informal actors such as agro pastoral organizations are networking to provide better livelihoods within the irrigated scheme area. This investigation focuses on the roles and interactions of agro pastoral organizations and finance institutions in relation to extension work in Rahad Scheme.
This paper provides a review of agronomic management practices supporting sustainable crop production systems and intensification, and testifying to developments in the selection of crops and cultivars. The paper also describes crop farming systems taking a predominantly ecosystem approach and it discusses the scientific application of this approach for the management of pest and weed populations.
Farmers’ experiments can be defined as the autonomous activities of farmers to try or introduce something new at the farm, and include evaluation of success or failure with farmers’ own methods. Experiments enable farmers to adapt their farms to changing circumstances, build up local knowledge, and have resulted in countless agricultural innovations. Most research on the topic has been conducted in countries of the south.
Organic farming is recognized as one source for innovation helping agriculture to develop sustainably. However, the understanding of innovation in agriculture is characterized by technical optimism, relying mainly on new inputs and technologies originating from research. The paper uses the alternative framework of innovation systems describing innovation as the outcome of stakeholder interaction and examples from the SOLID (Sustainable Organic Low-Input Dairying) project to discuss the role of farmers, researchers and knowledge exchange for innovation.
Mainstream agricultural research has focused primarily on technical and biological aspects and is aimed at controlling or manipulating nature through the use of external inputs, such as
agricultural chemicals or super seed. In developing countries, the results of this research have benefited some resource-rich farmers in well-endowed areas, were suitable to only a limited
extent for poorer farmers in the more favourable areas, and were - in most cases - completely inappropriate for small-scale farmers in marginal areas, e.g. in the mountains or the drylands.
Local innovation refers to the dynamics of Indigenous Knowledge (IK) - the knowledge that grows within a social group, incorporating learning from own experience over generations but also knowledge gained from other sources and fully internalized within local ways of thinking and doing. Local innovation is the process through which individuals or groups discover or develop new and better ways of managing resources - building on and expanding the boundaries of their IK.
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L’action locale est aujourd’hui confrontée au problème de changements climatiques, tant en termes de réduction des émissions de gaz à effet de serre que de gestion des impacts potentiels. La question particulière de l’adaptation aux changements climatiques émerge ainsi progressivement sur la scène locale et semble se généraliser depuis les évolutions législatives (Loi « Grenelle II ») qui rendent obligatoire la réalisation de plans climat-énergie territoriaux pour les collectivités de grande taille et des schémas régionaux climat-air-énergie.