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2. Assessing farmer perceptions on livestock intensification and associated trade-offs using fuzzy cognitive maps; a study in mixed farming systems in the mid-hills of Nepal
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- 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
- Journal Title:
- Systems Research and Behavioral Science
- Journal Title Details:
- Online only
- Notes:
- 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.
3. Contextual realities and poverty traps: why South Asian smallholder farmers negatively evaluate conservation agriculture
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Chaudhary, A. (author), Timsina, P. (author), Karki, E. (author), Sharma, A. (author), Suri, B. (author), Sharma , R. (author), and Brown, B. (author)
- Format:
- Journal Article
- Publication Date:
- 2023-02-20
- Published:
- England: Cambridge University Press
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 206 Document Number: D12837
- Journal Title:
- Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems
- Journal Title Details:
- Online
- Notes:
- 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.
4. Nepalese farmers’ climate change perceptions, reality and farming strategies
- Collection:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center (ACDC)
- Contributers:
- Budhathoki, Nanda Kaji (author) and Zander, Kerstin K. (author)
- Format:
- Online journal article
- Publication Date:
- 2019
- Published:
- Taylor & Francis
- Location:
- Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 75 Document Number: D10803
- Journal Title:
- Climate and Development
- Notes:
- 13 pages., via online journal., The study explores the impacts of Nepali farmers’ climate change perceptions on their farming practices over the last three decades (1980–2014). Results from a survey with 496 farmers show that nearly all farmers attributed changes in crop varieties and cropping patterns mainly to technological and market-related factors and not to climate change. A comparison between perceptions and meteorological data shows that while perceptions of changes in maximum temperatures did match observed trends, perceptions of changes in minimum temperature and rainfall did not. The results indicate that the climate change message in the past 30 years has not been definite enough to have a consistent impact on either farmers’ perceptions or their farming practices. This may impede farmers’ adaptive capacity in dealing with increasingly severe future climate change impacts. Because of large variations in the micro-climate of the study locations and the locations of the weather stations from which we obtained the meteorological data, the results need to be treated with caution. However, we suggest that for farmers to effectively adapt to climate change, it may be necessary for responsible state and non-state actors to improve their communication on expected climate change impacts.