Organic agriculture and rural livelihoods in Karnataka, India

The research explored the effects a change from conventional to organic farming had on the livelihoods of a group of farmers in Karnataka, South India. It involved semi-structured interviews with organic farmers, NGOs, consumers, marketing organisations, and the State Agricultural Department. The farmers in the case study perceived that they had improved their livelihoods over the long term by the conversion from conventional to organic farming. Reduced costs for external inputs and reduced labour requirements together with similar or higher yields and premium prices resulted in higher net-farm incomes. The conversion to organic farming reduced the reliance on credits and the risk of crop failure due to pests, diseases and droughts, thereby reducing vulnerability. In addition, the farmers mentioned enhanced natural assets, reduced risk of pesticide poisonings, improved food safety, higher levels of self-sufficiency, and the access to networks supporting knowledge exchange and political participation as important benefits of the conversion. However, almost all the case study farmers noted that the conversion period was difficult due to temporarily declining yields and a lack of information and experiences. This is likely to be a major constraint preventing asset-poor farmers from adopting organic agriculture

Stranger Things about Forcing without AC

Typically, set theorists reason about forcing constructions in the context of ZFC. We show that without AC, several simple properties of forcing posets fail to hold, one of which answers Miller's question from arXiv:0704.3998.Comment: 5 page

The traces of anisotropic dark energy in light of Planck

We study a dark energy model with non-zero anisotropic stress, either linked to the dark energy density or to the dark matter density. We compute approximate solutions that allow to characterise the behaviour of the dark energy model and to assess the stability of the perturbations. We also determine the current limits on such an anisotropic stress from the cosmic microwave background data by the Planck satellite, and derive the corresponding constraints on the modified growth parameters like the growth index, the effective Newton's constant and the gravitational slip.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figures; matches version accepted for publication in JCA