Strategies for sustainable natural resource management

This brief describes two case studies as follows: "Sub-Saharan Africa, with the highest fertility rate in the world, faces increasing demographic pressure on its natural resource base.... Old strategies for coping with these new pressures on the natural resource base are becoming increasingly infeasible... Consequently, Africa's farmers require new solutions to address the increasing pressure on the continent's soil and water resources. Among hundreds of innovative efforts across the continent, two promising sets of responses have emerged in different locations.... First is the use of planting basins, an approach that has emerged in recent decades in both the Sahel and Zambia.... The second strategy involves the use of improved fallows, introduced over the past decade in eastern Zambia and western Kenya." [from Text]. The authors look at the impact and the drivers of change and conclude with key lessons learned for buidling future successes.

The farmer trainers approach in technology dissemination in Uganda: Farmer trainers’ and trainees’ perspectives.

This working paper presents the results of the first phase of a study that aims to determine the effectiveness of the farmer trainers approach in the dissemination of feed technologies in the East Africa Dairy Development Project (EADD). The starting point of this study is in the recognition that public sector extension services are no longer able to provide small scale farmers with adequate extension services. As a result, new approaches and mechanisms are being developed to fill the gap. One such approach that is being used by the EADD project is the volunteer farmer trainers approach. It is a form of farmer-to farmer extension where farmers host demonstration plots and take centre stage in information sharing. Although this approach has been in use in the EADD project since its inception in 2008, not much is understood about its effectiveness. A study was therefore initiated to assess its effectiveness. The study was organised into three phases. The first phase, which is the subject of this report, is an exploratory informal survey to collect qualitative data from both the trainers and trainees to be used in formulating hypothesis for more in depth formal surveys in the next phases. Group discussions were held in three sites of the EADD project in three districts, namely Jinja, Mukono and Mityana to get the perceptions of farmer trainers and trainees on the effectiveness of the approach. Farmer trainers have served an average of 15.6 months and train an average of 5 trainees per month. Most of them undertake their activities by foot and a few use their own bicycles. Farmer trainers use various means of mobilizing farmers for their training sessions. Training sessions are normally held at trading centres, local county halls, demonstration sites and homesteads of trainees and trainers. Farmer trainers are motivated by the desire to gain more knowledge/skills, improve their own livelihoods and those of other farmers in the community and becoming popular among other factors. Some of the costs that farmer trainers incur are: transport, time and bicycle maintenance. Benefits received range from gaining knowledge and skills, popularity, increasing social networks to satisfaction. Challenges faced include transport, lack of training materials and family conflicts involving some farmer trainees and their spouses. Some of the low-cost opportunities for improving the approach include provision of training materials (manila paper, marker pen, sample seeds) and certification of farmer trainers. If resources are available, bicycles would help improve performance. Farmer trainers are an important source of information to farmers. Rating of topics taught by trainers was mixed with some topics being rated highly in terms of relevance, understanding and ease of use while others were rated low. On technology uptake by farmer trainees, the highest uptake was for Napier (Elephant) grass and pasture improvement (50%), followed by calliandra (47%). Other technologies such as silage, hay, lablab, leuceana and setaria had less than 30% uptake

Assessing research impact on poverty: the importance of farmers’ perspectives

P. Kristjanson and P.K. Thornton are ILRI authorsIn this paper we provide evidence to show that farmers' perspectives on poverty processes and outcomes are critical in the early stages of evaluating impact of agricultural research on poverty. We summarize lessons learned from farmer impact assessment workshops held in five African locations, covering three agro-ecological zones and five different agroforestry and livestock technologies arising from collaborative national–international agricultural research. Poverty alleviation is a process that needs to be understood before impact can be measured. Workshops such as those we describe can help researchers to identify farmers' different ways of managing and using a technology and likely effects, unanticipated impacts, major impacts to pursue in more quantitative studies, the primary links between agricultural technology and poverty, and key conditioning factors affecting adoption and impact that can be used to stratify samples in more formal analyses. Farmer workshops inform other qualitative and quantitative impact assessment methods. We discuss the linkage of farmer-derived information with GIS-based approaches that allow more complete specification of recommendation domains and broader-scale measurement of impact

Improved fallows in Eastern Zambia: history, farmer practice and impacts

"The decline in soil fertility in smallholder systems is a major factor inhibiting equitable development in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Some areas fallow in order to strength soil fertility for later planting, but as populations increase, demand follows and continuous cropping becomes the norm and there is a reduction in yields. This case study summarizes the development of improved tree fallows by researchers and farmers in eastern Zambia to help solve the problem of poor soil fertility. Many farmers are finding that by using improved fallows, they can substitute relatively small amounts of land and labor for cash, which they would need to buy mineral fertilizer. The study has three phases: the historical background (phase 1); an assessment of problems, description of the technology, and how it was developed (phase 2); and how the improved fallows practices were disseminated and spread (phase 3). This paper will describe each phase, the goals, and results." Authors' AbstractSouthern Africa, africa south of sahara, Crop yields,

Continuous Deployment Transitions at Scale

Predictable, rapid, and data-driven feature rollout; lightning-fast; and automated fix deployment are some of the benefits most large software organizations worldwide are striving for. In the process, they are transitioning toward the use of continuous deployment practices. Continuous deployment enables companies to make hundreds or thousands of software changes to live computing infrastructure every day while maintaining service to millions of customers. Such ultra-fast changes create a new reality in software development. Over the past four years, the Continuous Deployment Summit, hosted at Facebook, Netflix, Google, and Twitter has been held. Representatives from companies like Cisco, Facebook, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Netflix, and Twitter have shared the triumphs and struggles of their transition to continuous deployment practices—each year the companies press on, getting ever faster. In this chapter, the authors share the common strategies and practices used by continuous deployment pioneers and adopted by newcomers as they transition and use continuous deployment practices at scale

Acute RyR1 Ca2+ leak enhances NADH-linked mitochondrial respiratory capacity

Sustained ryanodine receptor (RyR) Ca2+ leak is associated with pathological conditions such as heart failure or skeletal muscle weakness. We report that a single session of sprint interval training (SIT), but not of moderate intensity continuous training (MICT), triggers RyR1 protein oxidation and nitrosylation leading to calstabin1 dissociation in healthy human muscle and in in vitro SIT models (simulated SIT or S-SIT). This is accompanied by decreased sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ content, increased levels of mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation proteins, supercomplex formation and enhanced NADH-linked mitochondrial respiratory capacity. Mechanistically, (S-)SIT increases mitochondrial Ca2+ uptake in mouse myotubes and muscle fibres, and decreases pyruvate dehydrogenase phosphorylation in human muscle and mouse myotubes. Countering Ca2+ leak or preventing mitochondrial Ca2+ uptake blunts S-SIT-induced adaptations, a result supported by proteomic analyses. Here we show that triggering acute transient Ca2+ leak through RyR1 in healthy muscle may contribute to the multiple health promoting benefits of exercise

Chemical profiles of the oxides on tantalum in state of the art superconducting circuits

Over the past decades, superconducting qubits have emerged as one of the leading hardware platforms for realizing a quantum processor. Consequently, researchers have made significant effort to understand the loss channels that limit the coherence times of superconducting qubits. A major source of loss has been attributed to two level systems that are present at the material interfaces. We recently showed that replacing the metal in the capacitor of a transmon with tantalum yields record relaxation and coherence times for superconducting qubits, motivating a detailed study of the tantalum surface. In this work, we study the chemical profile of the surface of tantalum films grown on c-plane sapphire using variable energy X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (VEXPS). We identify the different oxidation states of tantalum that are present in the native oxide resulting from exposure to air, and we measure their distribution through the depth of the film. Furthermore, we show how the volume and depth distribution of these tantalum oxidation states can be altered by various chemical treatments. By correlating these measurements with detailed measurements of quantum devices, we can improve our understanding of the microscopic device losses

The Public Repository of Xenografts enables discovery and randomized phase II-like trials in mice

More than 90% of drugs with preclinical activity fail in human trials, largely due to insufficient efficacy. We hypothesized that adequately powered trials of patient-derived xenografts (PDX) in mice could efficiently define therapeutic activity across heterogeneous tumors. To address this hypothesis, we established a large, publicly available repository of well-characterized leukemia and lymphoma PDXs that undergo orthotopic engraftment, called the Public Repository of Xenografts (PRoXe). PRoXe includes all de-identified information relevant to the primary specimens and the PDXs derived from them. Using this repository, we demonstrate that large studies of acute leukemia PDXs that mimic human randomized clinical trials can characterize drug efficacy and generate transcriptional, functional, and proteomic biomarkers in both treatment-naive and relapsed/refractory disease