Available online at www.centmapress.org, Using two different ranking procedures, main points of criticism as well as sideshows could be identified for fattening pigs, dairy cattle production, and laying hens
USA: American Farm Bureau Federation, Washington, D.C.
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 201 Document Number: D11898
Notes:
Accompanying news release obtained online at https://agrimarketing.com/ss.php?id=333510, Via online. 11 pages., Summary report of a survey of 2,000 U.S. adults. Conducted by Morning Consult. Survey data accompanied by a news release from AFBF entitled, "Poll shows Americans' unwavering trust in farmers and approval of sustainability practices." 2 pages. Dated November13, 2020, and provided online via Agri Marketing Weekly.
14 pages., Online via UI electronic subscription., Examines the impact of gain and loss message framing and issue involvement elicitation on consumer willingness to pay for two food safety enhancing technologies: cattle vaccines against E. coli and direct-fed microbials. Results showed strong consumer preference and willingness to pay for the technologies and consumer welfare gains from their introduction.
10pgs, Conservation agriculture-based sustainable intensification (CASI) is gaining prominence as an agricultural pathway to poverty reduction and enhancement of sustainable food systems among government and development actors in the Eastern Gangetic Plains (EGP) of South Asia. Despite substantial investment in research and extension programs and a growing understanding of the agronomic, economic and labor-saving benefits of CASI, uptake remains limited. This study explores farmer experiences and perspectives to establish why farmers choose not to implement CASI systems despite a strong body of recent scientific evidence establishing the benefits of them doing so. Through thematic coding of semi-structured interviews, key constraints are identified, which establishes a narrative that current households' resources are insufficient to enable practice change, alongside limited supporting structures for resource supplementation. Such issues create a dependency on subsidies and outside support, a situation that is likely to impact any farming system change given the low-risk profiles of farmers and their limited resource base. This paper hence sets out broad implications for creating change in smallholder farming systems in order to promote the adoption of sustainable agricultural technologies in resource-poor smallholder contexts, especially with regard to breaking the profound poverty cycles that smallholder farmers find themselves in and which are unlikely to be broken by the current set of technologies promoted to them.
Wallander, Steven (author), Smith, David (author), Bowman, Maria (author), and Claassen, Roger (author)
Format:
Research report
Publication Date:
2021-02
Published:
USA: Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 202 Document Number: D12143
Notes:
Economic Information Bulletin Number 222. 33 pages., This report detailed how cover crops are managed on corn, cotton, soybean, and wheat fields in the United States. "These surveys reveal that there are many different approaches to using cover crops."
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.
An analysis of secondary data from the National Panel Survey in Tanzania revealed physical, socioeconomic, and institutional factors influencing the adoption of soil conservation technologies among small-scale maize farmers. Findings revealed, for example, only 13.9 percent of those had adopted soil conservation technology. This was cited as small, compared with other countries.
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.
