Market access by smallholder farmers in Malawi: implications for technology adoption,agricultural productivity and crop income

In Malawi, maize is the major crop and food staple. Given limited off-farm employment opportunities, much-needed increases in household income for improving food security must come from gains in agricultural productivity through better technology and more profitable crops. In the past, hybrid maize and more recently, tobacco were promoted by policy for increasing smallholder income. An analysis of determinants of adoption of these two crops and related income effects is presented. Apart from factor endowment and exposure to agroecological risks, differences in the household's access to financial and commodity markets significantly influence its cropping shares and farm income.     

Exploring the adoption of precision agricultural technologies: A cross regional study of EU farmers

Precision agricultural technologies (PATs) allow more detailed management of in-field variability. Policy and advisory communities have championed PATs as a route to preserving natural capital whilst increasing productivity from agricultural land. A range of PATs are currently available for the agricultural producer but uptake varies by the type of technology and region. Whereas most studies on uptake have focused on US or Australia we empirically examine uptake of machine guidance (MG) and variable rate nitrogen technologies (VRNT) within European farming systems. Using primary information from 971 arable crop growers across five countries: Belgium, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands and the UK, a multilevel random intercept regression estimated a) the differences between adoption and non-adoption and b) the differences between VRNT and MG adoption. We find, aside from size and income differences, which reflect the economic cost barrier to adoption, an attitudinal difference, in terms of optimism towards the technology’s economic return leading to more probability of uptake. Moreover innovative and information seeking behaviour also proved significant when upgrading from machine guidance to variable rate technologies. Subsidy and taxation were considered positive drivers of uptake within the community. However, results suggest that more indirect interventions, such as informational support to counteract industry bias, and demonstration to prove the viability of economic return may be effective at meeting land manager and policy expectations towards PATs.     

Understanding the adoption of climate change adaptation strategies among smallholder farmers: Evidence from land reform beneficiaries in South Africa

Climatic change has a negative impact on people’s livelihoods, agriculture, freshwater supply and other natural resources that are important for human survival. Therefore, understanding how rural smallholder farmers perceive climate change, climate variability, and factors that influence their choices would facilitate a better understanding of how these farmers adapt to the negative impacts of climate change. A Zero-inflated double hurdle model was employed to estimate the factors influencing farmers’ adoption of adaptation strategies and intensity of adoption at the household level in South Africa. Different socioeconomic factors such as gender, age, and experience in crop farming, institutional factors like access to extension services, and access to climate change information significantly influenced the adoption of climate change adaptation strategies among beneficiaries of land reform in South Africa. Concerning intensity of adoption, age, educational level, farming experience, on-farm training, off-farm income, access to information through ICT and locational variables are the significant determinants of intensity of adaptation strategies. Thus, education attainment, non-farm employment, farming experience are significant incentives to enhance smallholder farmers' adaptive capacity through the adoption of many adaptation approaches. This study therefore concluded that farm-level policy efforts that aim to improve rural development should focus on farmers’ education, on-farm demonstration and non-farm employment opportunities that seek to engage the farmers, particularly during the off-cropping season. The income from non-farm employment can be plough-back into farm operations such as the adoption of soil and water conservation, use of improved planting varieties, insurance, among others to mitigate climate variability and subsequently increase productivity. Policies and investment strategies of the government should be geared towards supporting education, providing on-farm demonstration trainings, and disseminating information about climate change adaptation strategies, particularly for smallholder farmers in the country. Thus, the government, stakeholders, and donor agencies must provide capacity-building innovations around the agricultural extension system and education on climate change using information and communication technologies.     

Innovation context and technology traits explain heterogeneity across studies of agricultural technology adoption: A meta-analysis

Despite a wealth of case-specific insights from agricultural adoption studies, we lack systematic evidence on which technology characteristics matter for adoption across different innovation contexts. We synthesise the results of 304 quantitative farm-level adoption studies for a wide range of agricultural innovations across more than 60 countries using multi-level meta regression. Our results show that land, capital and knowhow are generally more important when an innovation uses the respective factor intensively, but this effect is reduced in contexts where the factor is abundant. Our findings have implications for the design of rural development and agricultural extension programmes. Both should consider the interplay of geographic context and innovation characteristics to develop more effective sustainable intensification strategies.     

Location and uptake: integrated household and GIS analysis of technology adoption and land use, with application to smallholder dairy farms in Kenya

CIS‐derived measures of location and space have increasingly been used in models of land use and ecology. However, they have made few inroads into the literature on technology adoption in developing countries, which continues to rely mainly on survey‐derived information. Location, with all its dimensions of market access, demographics and agro‐climate, nevertheless remains key to understanding potential for technology use. The measures of location typically used in the adoption literature, such as locational dummy variables that proxy a range of locational factors, now appear relatively crude given the increased availability of more explicit GIs‐derived measures. This paper attempts to demonstrate the usefulness of integrating CIS‐measures into analysis of technology uptake, for better differentiating and understanding locational effects. A set of GIs‐derived measures of market access and agro‐climate are included in a standard household model of technology uptake, applied to smallholder dairy farms in Kenya, using a sample of 3330 geo‐referenced farm households. The three technologies examined are keeping of dairy cattle, planting of specialised fodder, and use of concentrate feed. Logit estimations are conducted that significantly differentiate effects of individual household characteristics from those related to location. The predicted values of the locational variables are then used to make spatial predictions of technology potential. Comparisons are made with estimations based only on survey data, which demonstrate that while overall explanatory power may not improve with CIS‐derived variables, the latter yield more practical interpretations, which is further demonstrated through predictions of technology uptake change with a shift in infrastructure policy. Although requiring large geo‐referenced data sets and high resolution GIS layers, the methodology demonstrates the potential to better unravel the multiple effects of location on farmer decisions on technology and land use.     

农业科研事业单位岗位设置与管理浅析——以中国水产科学研究院为例

岗位设置和管理是事业单位人事制度改革的主要内容和目标。文章以中国水产科学研究院为例,概述岗位设置与管理,从人员比例、配套政策、人事管理制度等角度分析了科研事业单位岗位设置过程中存在的问题和难点,通过完善岗位管理办法和使用岗位等级评定办法来形成科学合理的岗位设置方案,通过岗位聘用、聘后管理和加强培训来完善岗位设定后的岗位管理制度。