13 pages, via Online Journal, This paper contributes to our understanding of farm data value chains with assistance from 54 semi-structured interviews and field notes from participant observations. Methodologically, it includes individuals, such as farmers, who hold well-known positionalities within digital agriculture spaces—platforms that include precision farming techniques, farm equipment built on machine learning architecture and algorithms, and robotics—while also including less visible elements and practices. The actors interviewed and materialities and performances observed thus came from spaces and places inhabited by, for example, farmers, crop scientists, statisticians, programmers, and senior leadership in firms located in the U.S. and Canada. The stability of “the” artifacts followed for this project proved challenging, which led to me rethinking how to approach the subject conceptually. The paper is animated by a posthumanist commitment, drawing heavily from assemblage thinking and critical data scholarship coming out of Science and Technology Studies. The argument’s understanding of “chains” therefore lies on an alternative conceptual plane relative to most commodity chain scholarship. To speak of a data value chain is to foreground an orchestrating set of relations among humans, non-humans, products, spaces, places, and practices. The paper’s principle contribution involves interrogating lock-in tendencies at different “points” along the digital farm platform assemblage while pushing for a varied understanding of governance depending on the roles of the actors and actants involved.
7 pages, This study aims to identify whether there is dependence between agricultural commodities traded on the Brazilian market. We used the bivariate copula method over a ten-year period to assess the extreme effects on the returns of the following commodities: soybean, wheat, Arabica coffee, and Robusta coffee. The relationship directly affects the dependence between Arabica and Robusta coffees commodities. While the relationship between wheat, Arabica and Robusta coffees, and soybean is positively dependent. Economic growth, market dynamics, and the prices of an agricultural commodity tend to increase the price of other commodities.
15 pages, via Online journal, Scholars are increasingly calling for the environmental issues of the industrial agricultural system to be addressed via eventual agroecological system-level transformation. It is critical to identify the barriers to this transition. Drawing from Henke’s (Cultivating science, harvesting power: science and industrial agriculture in California, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2008) theory of “repair,” we explore how farmers participate in the reproduction of the industrial system through “discursive repair,” or arguing for the continuation of the industrial agriculture system. Our empirical case relates to water pollution from nitrogen fertilizer and draws data from a sample of over 150 interviews with row-crop farmers in the midwestern United States. We find that farmers defend this system by denying agriculture’s causal role and proposing the potential for within-system solutions. They perform these defenses by drawing on ideological positions (agrarianism, market-fundamentalism and techno-optimism) and may be ultimately led to seek system maintenance because they are unable to envision an alternative to the industrial agriculture system.
12pgs, COVID 19 has exacerbated and underscored structural inequalities and endemic vulnerabilities in food, economic, and social systems, compounding concerns about environmental sustainability and racial and economic justice. Convergent crises have amplified a growing chorus of voices and movements calling for new thinking and new practices to adapt to these shifts, mitigate their impact, and address their root causes through far reaching changes in social and economic life and values, including breaking with the free market paradigm. In the face of a historic choice between transition or multiple systems collapse that deepen injustice and threaten planetary survival, I make the case for expanding on liberatory tendencies in Extension programs to build capacities for response-ability to transition toward more just and sustainable futures.
10 pages
e-ISSN: 2455-6270; p-ISSN: 2455-7455, In India even today more than half of the population is involved with agriculture thus making it the primary and important activity. Since most of the Indian population still lives in rural regions, so for this reason agriculture and related activities constitute the major source of revenue. Nonetheless, irrespective of the government's numerous efforts, there is still a huge disparity between a farmer's actual investment and the return on investment. As a result, the purpose of this research is to investigate the numerous factors
which impact farmers' attitudes about agricultural produce marketing. The study revealed that the majority of farmers belonging to the study region are low-income subsistence farmers who are more susceptible to agricultural hazards. Substantial farmers have better access to financing, but they do not contact financial institutions because of their large precautionary reserves.
15 pages, In the past few decades, climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has been promoted to improve food security and raise incomes as a strategy for sustainable agricultural development. The adoption rates among smallholder farmers, particularly in Africa, remain low and have varied in different contexts. This study investigated the market participation spillover effects from the adoption of CSA practices in central Malawi using the control function approach to address any endogeneity in the relationship. The hypothesis that the extent of the use of CSA practices in the past 10 years can lead to production surpluses that enable smallholder farmers to participate in markets and thereby increase in agricultural incomes was tested. Using survey data from 470 households in two districts of rural Malawi, a clear positive association between the number of CSA practices used and the extent of market participation was found. The findings suggest, among others, the need to intensify efforts to promote CSA adoption specifically over a longer period for benefits of the technologies to materialise. The adoption of CSA practices over time enhances crop market participation, an important aspect required for production sustainability as well as for transforming agriculture towards greater market orientation among smallholder farmers.
