Alomia-Hinojosa,Victoria (author), Groot, CJ (author), Andersson, Jens (author), Speelman, Erika (author), McDonald, Andrew (author), and Tittonnell, Pablo (author)
Format:
Journal article
Publication Date:
2022-06-02
Published:
United States: Wiley Online
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 205 Document Number: D12562
13 pages, Intensified livestock production is considered as a promising pathway for smallholder farmers. Nevertheless, this pathway may entail prohibitive investment requirements of labour, capital or trade-offs at farm level that preclude sustainable intensification. We used fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) to assess farmers' perceptions of changes in the farm household system resulting from adding livestock to their mixed farms. Farmers identified trade-offs between the increased income and farmyard manure production versus increases in labour requirements for fodder imports. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis performed on the FCMs showed that an increase in milk market demand could have strong positive effects on livestock production and income. We conclude that FCM is a good tool to rapidly identify trade-offs and analyse perceptions of farmers which revealed that although they consider intensification a promising strategy, the perceived deepening of labour constraints and increasing dependency on fodder import makes a concurrent (sustainable) intensification of these farm systems unlikely.
13pgs, With a focus on journalistic discourse, this paper argues for a re-envisioning of food-system communication that takes non-human animals into account as stakeholders in systems that commodify them. This is especially urgent in light of the global pandemic, which has laid bare the vulnerability to crisis inherent in animal-based food production. As a case study to illustrate the need for a just and non-human inclusive orientation to food-systems communication, the paper performs a qualitative rhetorical examination, of a series of articles in major U.S. news sources in May of 2020, a few months into the economic shutdown in the U.S. in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. At that time, millions of pigs were brutally killed on U.S. farms due to the impossibility of killing them in slaughterhouses overrun with COVID-19 outbreaks. The analysis finds that media reporting legitimated violence against pigs by framing narratives from industry perspectives, deflecting agency for violence away from farmers, presenting pigs as willing victims, masking violence through euphemism, objectifying pigs and ignoring their sentience, and uncritically propagating industry rhetoric about “humane” farming. Through these representations, it is argued, the media failed in their responsibility to present the viewpoints of all sentient beings affected by the crisis; in other words, all stakeholders. The methodology merges a textually- oriented approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) with social critique informed by critical animal studies (CAS), and the essay concludes with recommendations for journalists and other food-system communicators, which should be possible to implement even given the current capitalist, industry-influenced media environment and the demonstrated ruthlessness of animal industries in silencing voices inimical to their profitmaking.
9 pages, This study examines the labour of small-scale farmers during ploughing and develops a power tiller with the view of reducing the hardness of work and increasing the field operation capacity. The machine is designed and fabricated based on standard engineering principles for part-sizing and selection of materials. It is tested and the performance results obtained are compared to manual ploughing. Performance parameters were determined from fieldwork and laboratory experiments. The average depth, width of cut and operation speed were 14.84 cm, 24.56 cm and 3.48 km/h, respectively for power tiller compared with 10.62 cm, 18.97 cm and 0.49 km/h, respectively for manual ploughing. Average field efficiency and theoretical field capacity were 88.23%, and 0.096 ha/h, respectively for the power tiller compared with 96%, and 0.0136 ha/h for manual ploughing. Fuel consumption revealed for power tiller is 1.99 l/h. The field capacity of the machine was 0.075 ha/h which was higher than 0.013 ha/h for manual ploughing. The results show that the machine is suitable for small-scale farmers. Economic assessment of the power tiller is work to be done.
10 pages, Agricultural environment in many developing economies has become increasingly unpredictable in recent decades as a result of climate change, increasing the risk of crop failure. Access to meaningful information is required to mitigate the negative effects of the changing environment. This study examined the impact of agricultural extension services on the adoption of soil and water conservation (SWC) practices using data obtained from farming households in Northern Ghana. A multivariate probit model was used to assess the simultaneous or/and substitution adoption of SWC practices, while endogenous switching probit (ESP) was used to estimate the impact of extension services on adoption of SWC practices to account for observed and unobserved heterogeneities. The results showed that most of the SWC practices were adopted jointly, and factors such as non-farm economic activites and farm size influence the adoption of SWC practices. Moreover, farmers who accessed agricultural extension services had a higher probability of adopting most of the SWC practices (crop rotation, contour ploughing and manure application), and those who did not benefit from extension services would have had an equally higher likelihood of adopting the SWC practices had they accessed the services. The findings of the study imply that enhancing agricultural extension services will reduce adoption gaps in SWC practices, and consequently reduce farmers’ exposure to climate-related agricultural production risks. With growing information and communication technologies, pluralistic extension service delivery that mixes governmental and private-sector-led approaches to extension operations to foster demand-driven extension delivery services are highly recommended.
19 pages, The global climate change and rapid population increase are raising challenges for food security, and it demands efficient crop improvement methods that ensure superior quality and quantity of the crops. The advancements in nanotechnology can be explored to enhance sustainable crop improvement. Recently, nanotechnology has made massive revolutions in solving various problems faced by the human population, including the agriculture, environment and food sectors. In agriculture, nanotechnology has implications on every stage of farming, including seed germination, growth, harvest, processing, storage and transport of agricultural products. Nano fertilisers, nano herbicides, nano-fungicides, nano biosensors, nanoscale genetic carriers, nano-bioremediating agents and nanocomposites for packing are the novel applications of nanotechnology in the crop improvement area. Nanotechnology ensures the site-specific delivery of the nutrients in the plant's target region, which minimises the loss and increases efficiency. The reduced size of the nanomaterials offers a broader surface area for pesticides and fertilisers, drastically escalating disease and pest control in crops as they promise to overcome the shortcomings caused by traditional pesticide application. The advancement in nanotechnology is rapidly contributing to the digitalization of agriculture also. For example, nanotechnology widens the horizons of high-tech agricultural farms with the aid of biosensors.
The synthesis of nano enzymes also revolutionized the stress-tolerant mechanism of the plants by acting as an efficient antioxidant enzyme, and it has been widely used against salinity tolerance recently. The contribution of nanotechnology in effective transfer of genetic material in gene editing and genetic engineering techniques has also significantly contributed towards crop improvement. Nanobioremediation and nanophotocatalysis methods can also remove toxic substances from the environment. It is clear that, nanotechnology driven agri-food sector is expected to bloom in the near future. This review article summarizes the potential benefits of nanotechnology in agriculture and related fields, including the environment and food industry. Although nanotechnology has contributed a lot to the betterment of the world in various ways, they also face several limitations. Despite being a frontier of scientific advancement in the modern era, the negative impacts caused by nanotechnology cannot be sidelined. Therefore, this review also discusses the limitations of nanotechnology in the last section.
