Impact of push-pull technology on the nutritional status of farmers’ children in western Kenya

This study examined the impact of push-pull technology (PPT) on the nutritional status of children aged 1-12 years. Non-push-pull (NPPT) farmers were used as a control group to establish a comparative model for this study. It determined household production, consumption, and surpluses, comparing the PPT adopters to the nonadopters; found out the incomes and food expenditures from farm products; found out the household dietary diversity scores; and finally found the nutritional status of the two household groups. A six faceted household-level metrics was employed. A sample of 216 households that registered 326 children was derived. This study was conducted in western Kenya: Busia, Butere, Siaya, Vihiga, Kisumu, and Migori. In this study 53% were male and 47% female from the households assessed. Households with married couples were 87.5%, 1.9% were single parents, 0.5% were separated and 10.2% were widowed. Averagely, 7.20 members came from PPT households, while 6.99 were from NPPT households. Each household (both PPT and NPPT) had an average number of three children. The study further showed that 88 households of PPT had their income sources from farm products sales as NPPT had 67 households on the same. Income was averagely 126.29US$for PPT and 91US$ for NPPT. Push-pull households had 1303 Kgs of farm production while NPPT had 578 Kgs per year. The scale of agriculture to nutrition benefits recorded 8.7/10 for PPT and 7.14/10 for NPPT. Finally, PPT registered 12% of ≥+2SD, 84% of between -2 and > +2SD and 4% of ≤ -2SD for children under five years and 3% of ≥+2SD, 89% of between -2 and > +2SD and 8% of ≤ -2SD for children aged between 6 to 12 years. Non Push-pull households controversially registered 3% of ≥+2SD, 61% of between -2 and > +2SD and 36% of ≤ -2SD for children less than five years and 3% of ≥+2SD, 53% of between -2 and > +2SD and 44% of ≤ 2SD for children aged between 6 to 12 years. In conclusion, PPT is proven as an agricultural intervention that has enhanced nutritional improvement.Keywords: Push-pull Technology (PPT), Non Push-pull Technology (NPPT), nutrition, dietary diversity, food security, Body Mass Index (BMI), agricultur

Ecological management of cereal stemborers in African smallholder agriculture through behavioural manipulation

1. Africa faces serious challenges in feeding its rapidly growing human population owing to the poor productivity of maize and sorghum, the most important staple crops formillions of smallholder farmers in the continent,with yields being among the lowest in the world. 2. A complex of lepidopterous stemborers attack cereals in Africa. However, their effective control is difficult, largely as a result of the cryptic and nocturnal habits of moths, and protection provided by host stem for immature pest stages.Moreover, current control measures are uneconomical and impractical for resource-poor farmers. 3. An ecological approach, based on companion planting, known as ‘push–pull’, provides effective management of these pests, and involves combined use of inter- and trap cropping systems where stemborers are attracted and trapped on trap plants with added economic value (‘pull’), and are driven away from the cereal crop by antagonistic intercrops (‘push’). 4. Novel defence strategies inducible by stemborer oviposition have recently been discovered, leading to the attraction of egg and larval parasitoids, in locally adapted maize lines but not in elite hybrids. We also established that landscape complexity did not improve the ecosystem service of biological control, but rather provided a disservice by acting as a ‘source’ of stemborer pests colonising the crop. 5. Here we review and provide new data on the direct and indirect effects of the push–pull approach on stemborers and their natural enemies, including the mechanisms involved, and highlight opportunities for exploiting intrinsic plant defences and natural ecosystem services in pest management in smallholder farming systems in Africa

Gender appropriateness of field days in knowledge generation and adoption of push-pull technology in eastern Africa

Adoption studies have identified gender as one of the factors that determine technology uptake and this has been linked to women’s access to farming information or lack of it. Technology scaling up systems should utilise pathways that are compatible with the needs of rural women, who have to juggle farming with other household chores. Unfortunately, there has been limited effort to evaluate the suitability of the information pathways used to specific gender. The current study evaluates the appropriateness of field days with respect to gender of the participants. Data were collected from selected farmers who attended field days in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in 2014. A total of 2 615 participants were interviewed out of 6 221 who attended field days. Descriptive analysis and ordered probit and logit models were used for analysis. The majority of the participants in Kenya and Tanzania were women (51.3% and 62.6%, respectively), whereas in Uganda the majority of participants were men (57.4%). Most participants were middle aged (42 years for women and 45 years for men). The majority of the women (54.1%) had primary level education, with only 29.1% having secondary education, whereas 41% and 40.1% of men had attained primary and secondary education, respectively. The results from the econometric models shows that gender, age, education, being push-pull farmers, perceptions on Striga severity were the main significant determinants of knowledge for the ordered probit. Conversely, gender of the participant, perception on stemborers and Striga weed severity and having mobile phones were the significant determinants of willingness to adopt. The two models were significant at 1% (p < 0.001). The significance of the gender variable in the two models shows that women farmers understood more about push-pull (coefficient of ordered probit = −0.112) when trained during field days. Furthermore, the willingness to adopt push-pull after the training was much higher for women (coefficient of logit = −0.367) compared with men. The findings demonstrate that field days can be more appropriate for training farmers, especially women who are often disadvantaged in information access, as a result of their socio-economic circumstances

Genome-wide association analysis of a stemborer egg induced “call‑for‑help” defence trait in maize

Published online: 08 Jul 2020Tritrophic interactions allow plants to recruit natural enemies for protection against herbivory. Here we investigated genetic variability in induced responses to stemborer egg-laying in maize Zea mays (L.) (Poaceae). We conducted a genome wide association study (GWAS) of 146 maize genotypes comprising of landraces, inbred lines and commercial hybrids. Plants were phenotyped in bioassays measuring parasitic wasp Cotesia sesamiae (Cameron) (Hymenoptera: Braconidae) attraction to volatiles collected from plants exposed to stemborer Chilo partellus (Swinhoe) (Lepidoptera: Crambidae) eggs. Genotyping-by-sequencing was used to generate maize germplasm SNP data for GWAS. The egg-induced parasitoid attraction trait was more common in landraces than in improved inbred lines and hybrids. GWAS identified 101 marker-trait associations (MTAs), some of which were adjacent to genes involved in the JA-defence pathway (opr7, aos1, 2, 3), terpene biosynthesis (fps3, tps2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10), benzoxazinone synthesis (bx7, 9) and known resistance genes (e.g. maize insect resistance 1, mir1). Intriguingly, there was also association with a transmembrane protein kinase that may function as a receptor for the egg elicitor and other genes implicated in early plant defence signalling. We report maize genomic regions associated with indirect defence and provide a valuable resource for future studies of tritrophic interactions in maize. The markers identified may facilitate selection of indirect defence by maize breeders

Developing management strategies for Napier stunt disease

A presentation prepared by Zeyaur R. Khan and Charles A.O. Midega to the ASARECA/ILRI Workshop on Mitigating the Impact of Napier Grass Smut and Stunt Diseases, Addis Ababa, June 2-3, 2010

Host Range for Stemborers and Associated Natural Enemies in Different Farming Systems of Kenya

The geographical distribution and grass host range for stemborers and their natural enemies were assessed in three districts of Kenya between June 2002 and August 2003. In each district, grasses were sampled and dissected for presence of stem borers and/or their parasitoids (natural enemies). This was done in three cropping systems; (a) maize (Zea mays) surrounded by wild grasses, (b) sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) surrounded by wild grasses and (c) uncultivated grasslands. Busia and Suba districts had the higher diversity of stemborers than Machakos district. Similarly, parasitoids diversity was highest in Busia (24), followed by Suba (19) and the least in Machakos (9). Thirty-four species of stemborers belonging to the orders: Coleoptera [Anthribidae (1), Cerambycidae (3), Curculionidae (7), Mordellidae (3), Languriidae (3), and Tenebrionidae (2)]; and Lepidoptera [Noctuidae (6), Pyralidae (7), Cossidae (1), and Tortricidae (1)] were recovered from 31 grass species. Grass species that accounted for the highest diversity of stemborers were Hyparrhenia (Hyparrhenia rufa), Barnyard grass (Echinochloa pyramidalis), Guine grass (Panicum maximum), Guinea-fowl grass (Rottboellia cochinchinensis) and wild sorghum (Sorghum versicolor), Lemon grass (Cymbopogon afronardus), Hyparrhenia (Hyparrhenia rufa), Guine grass (Panicum maximum) and sporobolus (Sporobolus pyramidalis) were grass species with the highest parasitoid diversity

Transformational leadership, corporate social responsibility, organizational innovation, and organizational performance: Symmetrical and asymmetrical analytical approaches

This study examines the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational performance by evaluating the mediatory role of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and organizational innovation which has received considerably less attention in the literature. This study introduces CSR and organizational innovation as potential mediators of relationships between the key constructs of transformational leadership and organizational performance. Sufficient direct and mediation effects of predictors were tested using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with data from 396 French firms. Sufficient configurations of the predictors indicating high and low scores of performance were explored using fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). The PLS-SEM results show that both direct and indirect effects of transformational leadership on performance are significant. The fsQCA results reveal that a combination of CSR and transformational leadership leads to high performance. Alternately, high performance results from high innovation. This empirical study contributes to the current knowledge by applying both symmetrical and asymmetrical approaches to indicate performance at an organizational level. This study discusses the findings and provides theoretical, managerial, and research implications

Influence of zinc concentration on band gap and sub-band gap absorption on ZnO nanocrystalline thin films sol-gel grown

ZnO thin films were fabricated on quartz substrates at different zinc acetate molar concentrations using sol-gel spin coating method. The samples were characterized using X-ray diffraction, field emission scanning electron microscope, UV-Vis spectroscopy, FT-IR spectroscopy and photoluminescence spectroscopy. Sub-band gap absorption of ZnO thin films in the forbidden energy region was carried out using highly sensitive photothermal deflection spectroscopy (PDS). The absorption coefficients of ZnO thin films increased in the range of 1.5 eV to 3.0 eV, upon increasing zinc concentration. The optical band gaps were evaluated using Tauc's plots and found to be in the range of 3.31 eV to 3.18 eV. They showed the red shift in the band edge on increase in zinc concentration. The PL spectra of ZnO thin films revealed the characteristic band edge emission centered at the 396 nm along with green emission centered at the 521 nm