Brown, Brendan (author), Nuberg, Ian (author), Llewellyn, Rick (author), and School of Agriculture, Food and Wine, The University of Adelaide
CSIRO Agriculture
Format:
Journal article
Publication Date:
2018
Published:
Elsevier
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 16 Document Number: D10460
10 pages., Via online journal., Conservation Agriculture (CA) is a knowledge-intensive set of practices which requires substantial access to functional agricultural extension services to enable utilisation. Despite this importance, the perspectives of those providing extension services to smallholder farmers have not been fully investigated. To address this, we qualitatively explore the perspectives of agricultural extension providers across six African countries to understand why uptake of CA has been limited, as well as the institutional changes that may be required to facilitate greater utilisation. Across the diversity of geographical, political and institutional contexts between countries, we find multiple commonalities in the constrained utilisation of CA by smallholder farmers, highlighting the difficulties non-mechanised subsistence farmers face in transitioning to market-oriented farming systems such as CA. The primary constraint relates to the economic viability of market-oriented farming where farmers remain in low input and low output systems with limited exit points. The assumed exit point used by CA programs appears to have led to a culture of financial expectancy and reflects a continuation of top-down extension approaches with inadequate modification of CA to the contextual realities of subsistence farmers. If African agricultural systems are to be sustainably intensified, we find a need for greater flexibility within extension systems in the pursuit of sustainable intensification. If extension systems are to persist with CA, it will need to be promoted through more transitional pathways that disaggregate the CA package, and with that there is a need for the provision of a mandate to, and necessary funding for, more participatory extension services.
15 pages., Via online., Store-exit interviews with fresh food shoppers indicated that 38% were confident of country of origin of their food purchased. However, extent of knowledge varied somewhat by food category and more noticeably for specific food items within categories.
Knuth, Melinda (author), Behe, Bridget K. (author), Hall, Charles R. (author), Huddleston, Patricia (author), Fernandez, R. (author), and Texas A&M University
Michigan State University
Format:
Journal article
Publication Date:
2018-02
Published:
United States: American Society for Horticultural Science
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 11 Document Number: D10339
9 pages., Via online journal., Water is becoming scarcer as world population increases and will be allocated among competing uses. Some of that water will go toward sustaining human life, but some will be needed to install and support landscape plants. Thus, future water resource availability may literally change the American landscape. Recent research suggests that consumers’ attitudes and behavior toward potable water supplies have changed in other countries because of greater social awareness and increasingly widespread exposure to drought conditions. We conducted an online survey of 1543 U.S. consumers to assess their perceptions about landscape plants, the water source used to produce them, and plant water needs to become established in the landscape. Using two separate conjoint designs, we assessed their perceptions of both herbaceous and woody perennials. Consumers placed greater relative importance on water source in production over water use in the landscape for both herbaceous and woody perennials included in this study. They preferred (had a higher utility score for) fresh water over recycled water and least preferred a blend of fresh with recycled water for perennials and recycled water used for woody perennial production. In addition, the group that did not perceive a drought but experienced one placed a higher value (higher utility score) on nursery plants grown with fresh water compared with those which were actually not in drought and did not perceive one. Educational and promotional efforts may improve the perception of recycled water to increase the utility of that resource. Promoting the benefits of low water use plants in the landscape may also facilitate plant sales in times of adequate and low water periods.
Available online at www.centmapress.org, Results indicated that study participants had specific expectations regarding the husbandry conditions, but also regarding the product characteristics and the labelling of dual-purpose chickens.
18 pages, Recent studies cast doubt on the ability of abstract experiments to predict decision-making in the field. Thus, scholars have argued for more ‘realism’ by introducing context to field experiments. Yet, such realism may work against the induced values of monetary incentives in economic experiments. It is an open question whether contextual framing works best with or without inducing values, through methods such as the use of monetary incentives. Using a sample of 146 German farmers, we compare experimentally the predictive power of a framed lottery in an agricultural context vs. using an abstract version. For one half of the sample, lotteries are incentivised; for the other half, they are hypothetical. Although risk preferences differ between treatments, all four lottery tasks correlate poorly with farmers’ real-world use of risk management instruments such as harvest or hail insurance. Subjects who start with an agricultural framing are willing to take significantly greater risks in the lotteries. More generally, our findings cast doubt on the ability of lottery tasks to predict risk-taking in the field.
Waliczek, Tina M. (author), Parsley, Kathryn M. (author), Williamson, Paula S. (author), Oxley, Florence M. (author), and Texas State University
The University of Memphis
Austin Community College
Format:
Journal article
Publication Date:
2018-08
Published:
United States: American Society for Horticultural Science
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 11 Document Number: D10330
9 pages., Via online journal., Negative impacts from invasive species present a global problem. Consequently, invasive species biology has emerged as an important subdiscipline of conservation biology. One of the goals of invasive species biology is to educate the public about impacts and potential control of invasive species. The purpose of this study was to determine if a lecture, a lecture and laboratory learning model, or both influence college student learning gains and whether increase in knowledge results in changes in attitudes about invasive species. A pre- and posttest instrument that measured knowledge and attitudes of invasive species was administered to several different classes of students at a university and community college. One group of students received a lecture and laboratory curriculum between the pre- and posttest (the lecture and laboratory treatment group). A second group of students received a lecture between the pre- and posttest (the lecture-only treatment group) and a third group received no instruction between tests (the control group). The lecture was in the form of an electronic presentation, whereas the laboratory curriculum included a case study, a visual aid, and a scavenger hunt to educate students about examples of invasive plant and animal species. In all classes and groups, there were at least 2 weeks between administering the pre- and posttest. Results showed that the control group scores were not different between the pre- and posttest. However, both the lecture-only and the lecture and laboratory treatment groups had scores that changed after receiving the curricula. In addition, there was an effect of curricula on student learning for the three conditions. The differences between the group that received no curricula vs. the two that did indicated that the curricula were effective teaching interventions to help students become more educated about invasive species.
Social media networks are increasing in popularity and have been integrated into many aspects of daily life. Analysis of the ways in which individuals use social media is important for understanding social, cultural, and environmental issues. This study examines experiences of farmers’ market customers through their self- expression on social networks. Contributions to the Instagram social network based on the #farmersmarket hashtag were gathered on a single day, yielding 19,398 contributions created by 13,862 users. Six major linked hashtags were identified (#Organic, #Fresh, #Food, #Local, #Vegan, and #Healthy), providing key indicators of the characteristics of farmers’ markets that are valued by customers. Four customer segments were identified: Product Oriented, Emotional Oriented, Social Oriented, and Product-Social Oriented, with strong interconnections identified between these communities. The results of this study provide insights into consumer values and behaviors in the farmers’ market context and will be of practical use for future marketing and management.
17 pages, Modern agriculture is facing unique challenges in building a sustainable future for food production, in which the reliable detection of plantation threats is of critical importance. The breadth of existing information sources, and their equivalent sensors, can provide a wealth of data which, to be useful, must be transformed into actionable knowledge. Approaches based on Information Communication Technologies (ICT) have been shown to be able to help farmers and related stakeholders make decisions on problems by examining large volumes of data while assessing multiple criteria. In this paper, we address the automated identification (and count the instances) of the major threat of olive trees and their fruit, the Bactrocera Oleae (a.k.a. Dacus) based on images of the commonly used McPhail trap’s contents. Accordingly, we introduce the “Dacus Image Recognition Toolkit” (DIRT), a collection of publicly available data, programming code samples and web-services focused at supporting research aiming at the management the Dacus as well as extensive experimentation on the capability of the proposed dataset in identifying Dacuses using Deep Learning methods. Experimental results indicated performance accuracy (mAP) of 91.52% in identifying Dacuses in trap images featuring various pests. Moreover, the results also indicated a trade-off between image attributes affecting detail, file size and complexity of approaches and mAP performance that can be selectively used to better tackle the needs of each usage scenario.
