10 pages, Online via UI Library electronic subscription. Open access., "This paper re-affirms that women make essential contributions to agriculture and rural enterprises across the developing world. But there is much diversity in women's roles and over-generalization undermines policy relevance and planning."
26 pages, Agricultural productive services are an important means to achieve effective allocation of regional resources and play an important role in ensuring food security and improving farmers’ welfare. However, the development process of agricultural productive services still faces problems such as large differences in service levels in different segments and low participation rates in the full service. In order to investigate the influential paths of the low participation rate of farmers in the full-service process, this study takes maize farmers in northeast China as the research object. Based on 937 survey data from six cities in three northeastern provinces, we used the Item Response Theory (IRT) model to measure farmers’ information acquisition ability and constructed the Heckman two-stage model and the IV-Heckman model to analyze the logical framework of “information acquisition ability—farmers’ choice of productive agricultural services”. The main findings are as follows: firstly, the more channels there are, the stronger the farmers’ channel internalities; the higher the degree of channel differentiation, the stronger the farmers’ channel internalities. Second, after addressing the sample selection bias and endogeneity, there is a small rise in the facilitation effect of information acquisition ability on farmers’ productive agricultural service behavior. Third, this facilitation effect is achieved through farmers’ perceived usefulness of productive agricultural services, and the mediating effect of perceived ease of use is not significant. Therefore, fostering farmers’ self-perceptions and optimizing information delivery strategies are effective ways to promote farmers’ choice of agricultural productive services and to facilitate the modernization of Chinese agriculture. In general, this study helps to reveal the theoretical mechanism of farmers’ information asymmetry, and provides empirical evidence for how to promote the development of agricultural productive services.
8 pages., Via online journal, This paper examines the effect of farmers' access to communication technologies (CTs) on farmers' agricultural output at the aggregate level in the People's Republic of China (P.R. China) based on panel data. The paper uses a dynamic Cobb–Douglas aggregate production function and the generalized method of moments (GMM) as estimation techniques to estimate the parameters of interests. The research findings are: the estimated effects (measured by elasticity) of teledensity on the provincial level agricultural output have been positive and statistically significant both in the short and long runs. In the long-run, the size of the effect is substantial: from 0.94 to 1.06. This implies that the agriculture sector of the P. R. China has some potentials to derive benefit from the use of CTs like telephone. Hence, the Chinese government should consider policy support to expand communication infrastructure for the farmers
Woodard, Josua D. (author), Sherrick, Bruce J. (author), Atwood, Deborah H. (author), Blair, Robert (author), Fogel, Greg (author), Goeser, Nicholas (author), Gold, Barry (author), Lewis, Josette (author), Mattson, Carl (author), Moseley, Jim (author), O'Mara, Collin (author), Piotti, John (author), Salas, Bill (author), Scarlett, Lynn (author), Duncanson, Kristin Weeks (author), and Yoder, Fred (author)
Format:
Journal article
Publication Date:
2018
Published:
USA
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 199 Document Number: D09927
International: Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut.
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Document Number: D11096
Notes:
281 pages., "By drawing on many examples from around the world, this book explains that our approach to managing water can and must be changed if we are to avoid a global water crisis. Includes a table identifying barriers to adoption of water-sharing technologies.
15 pages., Via online journal., Plant pests cause crop losses of 30–40%, contributing significantly to global food insecurity. The Plantwise program works alongside national agricultural extension services, who advise smallholder farmers on plant health issues and collect data on problems they face. In a 1-year pilot, Plantwise tested the use of information and communication technologies (ICT)—tablets and short message service (SMS)—with 60 Kenyan extension workers. They were able to assist more farmers with better advice, had significantly improved access to plant health information, valued being able to ask their peers for advice, and dramatically improved the quality and speed of the data they collected.
