The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures taken by governments on social distancing and mobility restrictions have contributed to boosting the use of digital technology to bridge some of the physical access gaps. An increasing number of services and extension/information activities are delivered through digital tools and applications. E-commerce has also flourished. As a result, the potential of digital technologies has gained prominence in immediate response and recovery strategies and programmes.
The challenges faced by agricultural systems call for an advance in risk management (RM) assessments. This research identifies and discusses potential improvements to RM across 11 European Union (EU) farming systems (FS). The paper proposes a comprehensive, participatory approach that accounts for multi-stakeholder perspectives relying on 11 focus groups for brainstorming and gathering suggestions to improve RM.
Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) is the production of plants, fish, insects, or animals inside structures such as greenhouses, vertical farms, and growth chambers, in which environmental parameters such as humidity, light, temperature and CO2 can be controlled to create optimal growing conditions.
Le présent rapport concerne l’évaluation finale du projet «Intégration de la résilience climatique dans la production agricole et pastorale pour la sécurité alimentaire dans les zones rurales vulnérables à travers l’approche des champs-écoles des producteurs» (GCP/NER/043/LDF) financé par le Fonds pour l’environnement mondial (FEM) et exécuté conjointement par l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour l'alimentation et l'agriculture (FAO) et le Gouvernement du Niger de 2015 à 2021.
Many smallholder farmers in developing countries grow multiple crop species on their farms, maintaining de facto crop diversity. Rarely do agricultural development strategies consider this crop diversity as an entry point for fostering agricultural innovation. This paper presents a case study, from an agricultural research-for-development project in northern Ghana, which examines the relationship between crop diversity and self-consumption of food crops, and cash income from crops sold by smallholder farmers in the target areas.
This study uses 344 women and men survey respondents involved in conservation agriculture (CA) and small-scale irrigation schemes (SSIS) as data sources for examining the effect of gendered constraints for adopting climate-smart agriculture amongst women in three areas in Ethiopia. Qualitative and quantitative data collections were applied using survey, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson's chi-square test and binary logistic regression using statistical software for the social sciences (SPSS) version 24.
Agriculture remains the mainstay of Indian economy and major source of livelihood of rural household, predominantly by small and marginal farmers, and securing the food and nutritional security. This paper describes the reality of small and marginal farmers in India. These farmers face several problems of credit, input supply, proper linkage with market as so on. Women farmers are lagging behind in adopting the drudgery reduction technologies followed by health and nutrition of farm families.
Digitalisation is widely regarded as having the potential to provide productivity and sustainability gains for the agricultural sector. However, there are likely to be broader implications arising from the digitalisation of agricultural innovation systems. Agricultural knowledge and advice networks are important components of agricultural innovation systems that have the potential to be digitally disrupted.
Growing empirical evidence suggests that innovation platforms can be effective in enhancing agricultural research impact by creating an enabling environment for scaling of innovations such as novel technologies, practices and busines models . However, efforts to understand how these innovation platforms operate to scale innovations are insufficient. Such knowledge is critical for improving the design of agricultural innovation systems, specifically within the context of a rising interest in the innovation platform approach to support the transformation of agriculture across Africa.
Relying on cross-sectional data from 300 smallholder rice farmers, the study examined the effects of agricultural extension on improved rice variety adoption and farm income in northern Ghana. A recursive bivariate probit (RBP) model was used to assess the effect of agricultural extension on adoption while regression with endogenous treatment effect model (RETEM) was adopted to evaluate the effect of agricultural extension on farm income. The results indicate a statistically significant effect of agricultural extension on both adoption and farm income.