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Who are those people we call farmers? Rural Kenyan aspirations and realities
Rural Kenyan households have different aspirations and income portfolio strategies, including agricultural intensification and income diversification. This article reports on a study that interviewed 624 households to ...
Can African smallholders farm themselves out of poverty?
A great deal of research on agriculture in Africa is organised around the premise that intensification can take smallholder farmers out of poverty. The emphasis in programming often implicitly emphasizes focusing on farm ...
Effects of maize residue and mineral nitrogen applications on maize yield in conservation-agriculture-based cropping systems of Southern Africa
Conservation agriculture (CA) and no-till (NT)-based cropping systems could address soil degradation and fertility decline in southern Africa. A multi-location and multi-year experiment was carried out between 2008 and ...
Monitoring Changes in the Cultivation of Pigeonpea and Groundnut in Malawi Using Time Series Satellite Imagery for Sustainable Food Systems
Malawi, in south-eastern Africa, is one of the poorest countries in the world. Food security in the country hinges on rainfed systems in which maize and sorghum are staple cereals and groundnut and pigeonpea are now major ...
Money Matters: The Role of Yields and Profits in Agricultural Technology Adoption
Despite the growing attention to technology adoption in the economics literature, knowledge gaps remain regarding why some valuable technologies are rapidly adopted, while others are not. This paper contributes to our ...
Not just farmers: understanding rural aspirations is key to Kenya’s future
Capturing what drives the decision-making and aspirations of rural households, especially among the youth, will help design more effective policies and development initiatives that trigger positive, lasting change within ...
A recipe for success? Learning from the rapid adoption of improved chickpea varieties in Ethiopia
Many studies detail constraints deemed responsible for the limited adoption of new
technologies among smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. By contrast, here we
study the conditions that led to the remarkably fast ...
Resequencing of 429 chickpea accessions from 45 countries provides insights into genome diversity, domestication and agronomic traits
We report a map of 4.97 million single-nucleotide polymorphisms of the chickpea from whole-genome resequencing of 429 lines sampled from 45 countries. We identified 122 candidate regions with 204 genes under selection ...
Poverty eradication and food security through agriculture in Africa: Rethinking objectives and entry points
Agriculture in Africa is expected to meet the dual objectives of providing food and helping people to escape poverty. African agriculture is dominated by smallholdings and donors generally target their agricultural support ...
Who is quitting? An analysis of the dis-adoption of climate smart sorghum varieties in Tanzania
Purpose
New agricultural technologies are continuously generated and promoted for adoption by farmers with the expectation that they bring about higher benefits than older technologies. Yet, depending on the perceived ...