USA: College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 202 Document Number: D12123
Notes:
Via online research summary. 4 pages., Summary of a research project among rural and urban residents in the Upper Sangamon River Watershed in central Illinois to learn how much people care about local water quality, fish populations, and algae blooms, and how much they care about meeting Environmental Protection Agency targets which benefit the Gulf of Mexico. Responses indicated that rural and urban residents value efforts to reduce watershed pollution and are willing to pay for environmental improvements.
14 pages., via online journal., This article addresses a stated need within the food justice movement scholarship to increase the attention paid to the political socialization of hired farm hands in industrial agriculture. In Canada, tackling the problem of farm worker equity has particular social and political contours related to the Canadian horticultural industry’s reliance on a state-managed migrant agricultural labour program designed to fill the sector’s labour market demands. As Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) produces relations of ‘unfree labour’, engaging migrant farm workers in social movement initiatives can be particularly challenging. Critical educational interventions designed to encourage migrant farm workers’ contribution to contemporary social movements in Canada must therefore confront the socio-cultural obstacles that constrict migrant farm workers’ opportunities to participate as full members of their communities. In this article, I argue that social justice oriented approaches to community-based arts can provide a means for increasing the social movement contributions of farm workers employed through managed labour migration schema such as Canada’s SAWP.
Muhammed, Ibrahim (author), Ugochukwu Adonikam, Nnanna (author), and Farmers' willingness to take part in Sorghum-based Innovation Platform in Niger State, Nigeria
Format:
Journal Article
Publication Date:
2020
Published:
India: Extension Education Society
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 202 Document Number: D12095
7 pgs., The research examined the determinants of farmers’ willingness to partake in sorghumbased innovation platforms, ascertained the factors influencing their willingness and constraints to their participation. Structured questionnaire was used to elicit data from 350 registered respondents drawn from Niger State, Nigeria. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, Probit and multiple regression. The result reveals that the farmers' mean age was 40. About 85 % of them were married with a household size of 1-5 persons. The result of probit showed that availability of active labour force, income from the sorghum, number of trainings, access to extension service and market access were the major determinants to farmers’ participation in sorghum innovation platform. Major constraints were, untimely meetings, poor means of transportation, information gap and complexity of innovation. The study concludes that farmers were willing to participate in sorghum-based innovation platform but do not have enough capital base. The study recommends that farmers should be linked up with credit institutions and timely meetings should be conducted
12 pages., An extraordinary moment of agricultural modernization is currently underway due to innovations in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). In this process, management precepts are renewed, fostering significant gains in efficiency, productivity, and sustainable use of natural resources and the environment. The growing supply of ICTs and the extension of connectivity in rural areas, with their transforming roles in productive practices and economic relations, bring about questions regarding their impacts. These technologies include precision positioning systems and large volume databases, electronic sensors of site-specific production and environmental conditions, repositories of relational data, statistical and crop forecasting software, methodologies and processes; web-based information services, among others. The assessment of impacts focused on ICTs for agriculture needs innovative approaches, due to the peculiarities of their applications, the different scales of their socioenvironmental scopes and, at the same time, the verification of effectiveness of institutional investments on research, development, and innovation (RD&I). Based on these premises, the objectives of this work are to present a ‘module of impact indicators for Information and Communication Technologies (Ambitec-TICs)’, and assess its application to six typical technology adoption cases resulting from agricultural RD&I projects. The results detail critical analyses of the contributions of the proposed module for the registration, interpretation, and communication of impacts, with recommendations for technology transfer and accountability in institutional Social Balance documentation.
20 pages, This paper assesses the impact of access to agricultural credit on the agricultural productivity of 422 smallholder farmers that cultivate maize or rice in the Western and Eastern province of Rwanda. Stratified, simple random and convenience sampling techniques were used to sample districts, sectors, cells and households. Data were collected using structured interviews and analyzed using propensity score matching techniques. Results indicated that productivity was higher by 44% among the farmers who accessed credit implying that they harvested on average an extra 440 kilograms of maize or rice. According to a crop-specific analysis, agricultural credit access had a more significant impact on maize productivity, with a difference in proportion of 68% (p = 0.000) but had no impact on rice productivity (p = 0.149). The study concludes that agricultural credit was important for Rwanda’s agricultural productivity. Thus policy measures should aim at improving smallholder farmers’ access to agricultural credit and promoting the use of modern agricultural inputs, particularly among rice farmers in Rwanda
