Changing the food game: Market transformation strategies for sustainable agriculture by Lucas Simons

Experts in the area of new agricultural standards, codes, and certifications tend to hold strong perspectives on the reforms that they believe will transform unsustainable conventional farming practices. However, these important practitioner points of view infrequently make a big splash in global conversations and debates on the future of agriculture. The perspectives of philanthropists, celebrities, and generalists have of late received more attention than those of insider-type individuals that address this issue from their own particular technical or analytical perspective. And it is this gap that certification, farmer organization, and agricultural development consultant Lucas Simons seeks to fill in his new and highly accessible book Changing the Food Game

Cameroon: Perspectives on Food Security and the Emerging Power Footprint

The reality that food security is a contested concept and ultimately a matter of perspective has considerable implications for Cameroon’s partnerships with emerging powers. This article argues that Cameroon could achieve a more sustainable and equitable food system if greater policy attention is directed toward understanding the range of perspectives that contend to influence food security policy, and to engaging with viewpoints that vie to assess the ‘footprint’ of emerging powers in this area. The analysis presented below shows that the principal perspectives that compete to influence Cameroonian policy vary depending on the particular dimension of food security or aspect of emerging power activity under discussion. This finding challenges previous typologies, and encourages more nuanced interpretations of debates on these matters moving forward

On the propagation of calcium waves in an inhomogeneous medium.

Although the exact details are disputed, it is well established that propagating waves of increased intracellular free Ca 2+ concentration arise from a positive feedback or autocatalytic mechanism whereby Ca 2+ stimulates its own release. Most previous modeling of the propagation of Ca 2+ waves has assumed that the sites of autocatalytic Ca 2+ release, the activation sites, are homogeneously distributed through the cytoplasm. We investigate how the spacing and size of the activation sites a#ect the existence and speed of propagating calcium waves. We first study the simplest model of an excitable system to obtain analytic estimates of the critical spacing. We then derive analytic expressions for the speed of the advancing wave front in the self-oscillatory case and compare them to numerical results. The theoretical results are illustrated by computed solutions of two similar models for calcium wave propagation

Myth or reality? The Digitalization of Climate-Smart Agriculture (DCSA) practices in smallholding agriculture in the Bono East Region of Ghana

Digitalization of Climate-Smart Agriculture practices leverages the power of digital agriculture tools/services (DATs) of any form (hardware, software, or data) in Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) practices to promote enhanced adaptation, GHGs emissions mitigation and increase productivity for smallholding agriculture. This research used a mixture of participatory and learning approaches with an emphasis on Expert Interviews and a Large-scale Household Survey involving 1219 farmers in the Bono East of Ghana to assess the awareness and utilization of DATs in smallholder farmers' CSA practices. Precisely, we assess farmers' engagement with Digital Agriculture Services (DAS) and DAT such as; TVs, Radios, Mobile phones/Tablets, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV)/Drones, Soil Sensor, Moisture Meters, Rain Gauges, Farm Management Software, Smartphone Applications, and Field Thermometers. The research suggests that the ubiquity of TVs, Radios, and feature phones in rural communities makes these tools the most used devices in farmers' climate-smart practices. However, the level of awareness, availability, accessibility, and utilization of complex tools such as UAVs and simpler tools such as soil sensors, moisture meters, field thermometers, rain gauges, smartphone applications (Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc.), and farm management software is minimal among rural farmers.The DAS facilitating farmers' climate-smart practices is limited to Digital Agroadvisory Purposes (digital extension), Agri-Digital Finance, and Digital Procurement services, while engagement with other DAS, such as Agri E-Commerce which facilitates most CSA Institution/Market Smart practice, is non-existing in rural communities. In addition, the Digitalization of Climate-Smart Agriculture, in its present form, is only limited to a few CSA practices and DATs engagement among smallholders owing to unmet training and information needs for most Climate-Smart Agriculture practices and interventions. Challenges such as DATs' unavailability, inaccessibility, high cost, high (digital)illiteracy, and inadequate extension support for the digitalization of CSA practices limit uptake. The study proposes increased capacity building for smallholders on CSA practice and interventions. Likewise, a strong public–private partnership across multiple scales is needed to stimulate needed investment to enhance farmers' access to affordable, easy-to-use, and tailor-made DATs while recognizing the power dependence and inequalities these digital tools may unleash in rural communities. Finally, increasing sensitization on DAT's use and benefits in rural communities and the larger population is critical to enhancing the widespread Digitalization of Climate-Smart Agriculture practices in smallholding agriculture