Exploring opportunities for diversification of smallholders' rice-based farming systems in the Senegal River Valley

CONTEXT: Policy-based or technological interventions are more likely to be effective if aligned with farmers' objectives, constraints, and decision-making processes. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to explore trade-offs and synergies of farming systems in response to innovative rice cultivation activities by understanding current farming systems, main drivers impacting farm management and farmers' perspectives on rice intensification. Understanding these interrelations is key in rice production areas, where smallholder farmers largely depend on growing rice to subsist. METHODS: A rapid system analysis was conducted interviewing 20 farmers in 4 villages along the Senegal River Valley (SRV) to obtain a general view on farm functioning and farmers' perspectives on farming systems. A detailed system analysis with four farmers was subsequently conducted to provide an insight into the underlying processes regulating farm management. A multi-objective optimization model was used to quantitatively evaluate and explore farm performances based on four selected indicators representing: rice production, household agricultural profit, household labour and farm nutrient balance. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study showed that government programmes and farmers' Unions were strongly influencing farmers' decision-making in agricultural production. Farmers also reported that although rice was still essential for their livelihoods, there were transitions towards less rice production in the wet season with short duration rice varieties and more vegetable production. Both farmers' interviews and the modelling results suggested that farmers would be unlikely to increase or even maintain the area of rice double cropping, which has been strongly promoted by the Senegalese government. Instead, farmers would rather keep investing in vegetable production. SIGNIFICANCE: This modelling study shows the consequences of policy-based and technological interventions for farming systems and may inform both policy makers and farmers in situations where objectives are strongly divergent. Hence, modelling outcomes may be used to inspire discussion and innovation in order to align the government priority of ensuring national food security and farmers' objectives and constraints in the SRV

Putting social networks to practical use: improving last-mile dissemination systems for climate and market information services in developing countries

Understanding how to improve the accessibility and timely dissemination of weather and market information can help farmers adapt their management to climate change impacts. Our objective is to use Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a tool to identify potential opportunities for improving weather and market advisory dissemination to rural communities and to explore the relationship between farmers' access to information and yield and selling price. As a case study, we applied SNA to 313 farmers in Bangladesh to analyze weather and market information networks and farmers' friendship networks as a potential proxy for information exchange. Farmer access to information, dominant sources of information and potential speed of information transfer were key criteria for our analysis. Our results indicate that weather and market information networks in coastal Bangladesh depended on certain key sources of information, while the friendship network was decentralized and interconnected, with few isolated farmers. We showed that farmers networks are significantly correlated with several socio-agro-economic variables; however, there was little indication of a relationship between information access and yield and selling price. We conclude that a mixed approach of targeting central actors and broadcasting information to farmers may be a suitable strategy to reach a maximum number of farmers as well as the most isolated farmers. Our study highlights that SNA can be a promising tool to reveal hidden structures of information flows in farmer communities and provide valuable insights for developing information dissemination strategies that reach even the most remote and underserved farmers

Complex systems, simple solutions? Evaluating technologies for sustainable intensification in northern Ghana.

United States Agency for International Developmen

Complex systems, simple solutions? Operationalizing diversity to understand technology adoption

United States Agency for International Developmen

Responding to future regime shifts with agrobiodiversity: A multi-level perspective on small-scale farming in Uganda

We analyse the impact of two large-scale regime shifts caused by disease incidence or climate change, and associated crop productivity and price changes, on banana-based smallholders in Uganda. We evaluate these farmers' vulnerability and assess the potential of using increased crop diversity to improve their resilience. We further explore trade-offs and synergies between environmental, economic and nutritional outcomes faced by the farmers in their decision making when a regime shift occurs. We simulate the large-scale scenarios with the IMPACT model and use the results obtained to assess their effect at the local level using the bio-economic farm-household model, FarmDESIGN. Our results indicate that climate change can lead to a regime shift that expands revenue variance, increases soil erosion and reduces vitamin A yield for farmers. Banana disease can negatively impact income levels and species diversity. We show that under both scenarios farmers have scope to reconfigure their farms and recover farm performance. Specifically, we discuss the benefits of species diversity; increasing agrobiodiversity by adding new crops increases the farm's adaptive capacity and resilience, allowing for much higher revenues, on-farm crop diversity and vitamin A production. The conceptual approach and the method we developed can be applied to assess the local synergies and trade-offs between crop diversity conservation, nutrition, environmental protection and human nutrition that farmers face as a result of global drivers. Our results offer a further understanding of how biodiverse systems respond to regime shifts, which can inform effective policy design. Our method can be also useful to help farmers manage their farms in a way to better meet their complex needs.</p

Improved feeding and forages at a crossroads: Farming systems approaches for sustainable livestock development in East Africa

Dairy development provides substantial potential economic opportunities for smallholder farmers in East Africa, but productivity is constrained by the scarcity of quantity and quality feed. Ruminant livestock production is also associated with negative environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, air pollution, high water consumption, land-use change, and loss of biodiversity. Improved livestock feeding and forages have been highlighted as key entry point to sustainable intensification, increasing food security, and decreasing environmental trade-offs including GHG emission intensities. In this perspective article, we argue that farming systems approaches are essential to understand the multiple roles and impacts of forages in smallholder livelihoods. First, we outline the unique position of forages in crop-livestock systems and systemic obstacles to adoption that call for multidisciplinary thinking. Second, we discuss the importance of matching forage technologies with agroecological and socioeconomic contexts and niches, and systems agronomy that is required. Third, we demonstrate the usefulness of farming systems modeling to estimate multidimensional impacts of forages and for reducing agro-environmental trade-offs. We conclude that improved forages in East Africa are at a crossroads: if adopted by farmers at scale, they can be a cornerstone of pathways toward sustainable livestock systems in East Africa.</p