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
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.
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.