Tag: rural households
Farmer nurseries as a catalyst for developing sustainable land use systems in southern Africa. Part B: Support systems, early impact and policy issues
Support to farmer nurseries is classified as either “hard” referring to material inputs (tree seed, water, inoculum, tools and fencing) or “soft” (information, training and backstopping advice). Against a background of poor services for smallholder farmers in southern Africa, it was hypothesized that a number of support agents operating at the grass root level together with farmers themselves provide the different support functions needed in farmer nurseries. A study was conducted to evaluate the role of support systems in farmer nurseries in Malawi, Zambia and Tanzania. Furthermore, the early tree planting impact of farmer nurseries was assessed in Malawi. Support for hard inputs came largely from single service providers, with significant and increasing contributions coming from farmers themselves. Soft inputs came from a larger diversity of providers with collaborative effort gaining importance. There is an urgent need to facilitate grassroot level support systems with larger participation from the private sector for tree seed and from the national extension services for provision of training and backstopping advice. It was noted that individual nurseries achieved larger transplanting impact, but this did not translate into higher impact at the landscape level, because group nurseries were the predominant type. Strengthening the human capital of farmers and service providers emerged as critical in increasing impact. Farmer nurseries are shown to play a number of important and interrelated functions in building natural, human and social capital. Monitoring and evaluating farmer nurseries in catalyzing these three functions should therefore receive proper attention in assessing the impact of sustainable land use systems. Policies need to be articulated to address some of the major constraints identified.
The Rural Household Multi-Indicator Survey (RHoMIS) for rapid characterisation of households to inform climate smart agriculture interventions: Description and applications in East Africa and Central America
Achieving climate smart agriculture depends on understanding the links between farming and livelihood practices, other possible adaptation options, and the effects on farm performance, which is conceptualised by farmers as wider than yields. Reliable indicators of farm performance are needed in order to model these links, and to therefore be able to design interventions which meet the differing needs of specific user groups. However, the lack of standardization of performance indicators has led to a wide array of tools and ad-hoc indicators which limit our ability to compare across studies and to draw general conclusions on relationships and trade-offs whereby performance indicators are shaped by farm management and the wider social-environmental context. RHoMIS is a household survey tool designed to rapidly characterise a series of standardised indicators across the spectrum of agricultural production and market integration, nutrition, food security, poverty and GHG emissions. The survey tool takes 40–60 min to administer per household using a digital implementation platform. This is linked to a set of automated analysis procedures that enable immediate cross-site bench-marking and intra-site characterisation. We trialled the survey in two contrasting agro-ecosystems, in Lushoto district of Tanzania (n = 150) and in the Trifinio border region of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras (n = 285). The tool rapidly characterised variability between farming systems at landscape scales in both locations identifying key differences across the population of farm households that would be critical for targeting CSA interventions. Our results suggest that at both sites the climate smartness of different farm strategies is clearly determined by an interaction between the characteristics of the farm household and the farm strategy. In general strategies that enabled production intensification contributed more towards the goals of climate smart agriculture on smaller farms, whereas increased market orientation was more successful on larger farms. On small farms off-farm income needs to be in place before interventions can be promoted successfully, whereas on the larger farms a choice is made between investing labour in off-farm incomes, or investing that labour into the farm, resulting in a negative association between off-farm labour and intensification, market orientation and crop diversity on the larger farms, which is in complete opposition to the associations found for the smaller farms. The balance of indicators selected gave an adequate snap shot picture of the two sites, and allowed us to appraise the ‘CSA-ness’ of different existing farm strategies, within the context of other major development objectives. © 2016 Elsevier B.V.
Developing ‘farmer first’, locally adapted agroforestry in eastern Africa
Over 110 million people in Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda depend upon smallholder farming practised across 25 million ha of land. Smallholders generally focus on subsistence, use low levels of external inputs, depend on rainfall rather than irrigation and have limited market access. Most rural households are resource poor, food insecure and vulnerable to climate change, particularly frequent droughts and flooding and global warming. This situation is compounded by population growth (3% per year across the region) and an increased demand for food, water and energy, coupled with declining farm productivity, over-exploitation of trees in agricultural landscapes, and deforestation.