Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: KerryByrnes2 Document Number: D01193
Notes:
Kerry J. Byrnes Collection, Paper submitted for the 5th World Congress for Rural Sociology,36 pages., Small farmer agriculture in developing countries is conceptualized in terms of a social system elements model in which social organizational (power, rank,status-role), social psychological (norm, belief, sentiment),and social economic (objective, facility,sanction) elements enter the farmer's decision making regarding which technology is most beneficial to employ in his farming operation.
Via Association AGRIDEA., "Learning how small-scale farmers learn from the new technologies exhibited in Mekelle by their peers and by modern workshops and research centres made us realize how little the majority of 'educated' people in agricultural research and development understand what interests the farmers."
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.
