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Publications (238)
South and Southeast Asia host almost half of the world’s undernourished people. Food and agricultural systems in these regions are highly dependent on the production and consumption of staple cereals such as rice, maize and wheat. More diverse farming systems can potentially improve rural people’s nutrition, while reducing the environmental impact...
Abstract
CONTEXT
Despite recent improvements in living standards, a substantial proportion of farm households in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is food insecure, and increasing crop productivity could help address this problem.
OBJECTIVE
We estimated the effect of increasing maize yields with mineral fertilizer on household food security and on regiona...
The risk of malnutrition, particularly micronutrient deficiency, is high in large parts of Sub-Saharan Africa for smallholder farmers. Access to diverse and nutritious food is a key component of food security, and a major development objective. It is widely accepted that good access to markets can play a key role in improving nutrition at the foods...
This editorial observes 200 volumes of Agricultural Systems. Volume 1, dated January 1976, began with an article by the inaugural editor, C.R.W. Spedding (1976), that laid the foundations for this journal. We echo that first editorial with this contribution to begin Volume 201 and review some aspects of the history of the journal. To celebrate thos...
Diversity in agricultural systems is often presented as having benefits for multiple purposes like food and nutrition security in low- and middle-income countries. Our review aims to give an overview of the strength and direction of the diversity-food security relationship as presented in research published since 2010, based on a comprehensive sear...
CONTEXT
In May 2020, approximately four months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the journal's editorial team realized there was an opportunity to collect information from a diverse range of agricultural systems on how the pandemic was playing out and affecting the functioning of agricultural systems worldwide.
OBJECTIVE
The objective of the special iss...
CONTEXT
The COVID-19 pandemic caused unprecedented global disruption and continues to wreak havoc. Dire predictions were made about the risks to smallholder farmers in lower- and middle- income, but hard data have been lacking. We present the results from 9201 interviews with smallholder farmers from seven countries.
OBJECTIVE
The objectives are t...
A large proportion of rural households, particularly in the dry land areas, representative for more than 10% of the world's land surface and up to 80% in Morocco, depend for their livelihoods on livestock. They exploit livestock's capacity to live in very harsh environments using herd-mobility at multiple scale level. Understanding the multiple con...
Smallholder farming in sub-Saharan Africa keeps many rural households trapped in a cycle of poor productivity and low incomes. Two options to reach a decent income include intensification of production and expansion of farm areas per household. In this study, we explore what is a “viable farm size,” i.e., the farm area that is required to attain a...
CONTEXT
Colombia has a total of 27.2 million heads of cattle, ranking fourth among the Latin American countries. Identifying sustainable strategies to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) will help the Colombian government meet their goal of a 51% reduction in national emissions by 2030. Estimation of yield gaps for identifying the potential to...
CONTEXT
Sustainable intensification is one approach to increasing food production without undermining sustainability goals. In recent years new tools and indicators have been developed for broad-based assessment of sustainable intensification. However, most of these tools have been applied at field level and assessing individual technologies, while...
East Coast Fever is a critical cattle disease in East and Southern Africa which is currently mainly controlled through frequent chemical removal of ticks, the disease vector. However, a vaccine conveying life-long immunity has existed for some time, known as the infection and treatment method (ITM), although it has so far not been widely adopted be...
A systematic review of recent publications was conducted to assess the extent to which contemporary micro-level research on smallholders facilitates data re-use and knowledge synthesis. Following PRISMA standards for systematic review, 1,182 articles were identified (published between 2018 and 2020), and 261 articles were selected for review in ful...
Most food in sub-Saharan Africa is produced on small farms. Using large datasets from household surveys conducted across many countries, we find that the majority of farms are less than 1 ha, much smaller than previous estimates. Farms are larger in farming systems in drier climates. Through a detailed analysis of food self-sufficiency, food and nu...
Achieving SDG2 (zero hunger) in a situation of rapid global population growth requires a continued focus on food production. Farming not merely needs to sustainably produce nutritious diets, but should also provide livelihoods for farmers, while retaining natural ecosystems and services. Rather than focusing on production principles, this article e...
Rural households across the world are increasingly turning to off-farm sources of income to complement or replace farm income. A better understanding of these livelihood adaptations, their consequences, and the processes behind them will facilitate more effective rural development policies and projects. The objective of this research was to examine...
Food system innovations will be instrumental to achieving multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, major innovation breakthroughs can trigger profound and disruptive changes, leading to simultaneous and interlinked reconfigurations of multiple parts of the global food system. The emergence of new technologies or social solutions, the...
In this study we evaluate Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) assessment tools with regard
to their suitability for covering not only biophysical but also socio-economic aspects
of CSA, focusing on smallholder household level in Low and Middle Income Countries
(LMIC). In this opinion piece we give a concise overview of the most recent developments
in m...
The annual income of small-scale farmers in the Jordan Valley, West Bank, Palestine remains persistently low compared to other sectors. The objective of this study was therefore to explore some of the main barriers to reducing poverty and increasing farm income in the region. A “Rural Household Multi-Indicator Survey” (RHoMIS) was conducted with 24...
Over the past year and a half there have been substantial changes to the leadership of Agricultural Systems, both in the Editorial Team and in the Editorial Advisory Board. We have also introduced two new article types.
There are clear signs that milk production growth is leveling off, and recently even declining, in China. Heat stress is one of the main reasons for the recent reduction in milk production. In this study, we computed the change in milk production as a result of heat stress in major milk production areas in China. We constructed a temperature–humidi...
Achieving food and nutrition security for all in a changing and globalized world remains a critical challenge of utmost importance. The development of solutions benefits from insights derived from modelling and simulating the complex interactions of the agri-food system, which range from global to household scales and transcend disciplinary boundar...
In the western highlands of Guatemala, the indigenous population is one of the most marginalized communities. The food security of subsistence and infrasubsistence smallholders within this population still relies on domestic agricultural production as the principal livelihood activity and the main source of food. Smallholder production systems in t...
Background
The number of undernourished people and the risk of micro-nutrient deficiency remain high in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Decades of policy designed to reverse the trends of food insecurity have illustrated that the causal pathways of intervention to end-point outcomes, such as nutrition, are not necessarily straightforward. Utilising proxi...
Rollout of development interventions using a one-size-fits-all model can achieve economies of scale but neglects to account for variability in farm and farmer characteristics. A data-driven approach to incorporate farmer diversity in scaling strategies may help to achieve greater development impact. However, interpreting the multiplicity of smallho...
Rollout of development interventions using a one-size-fits-all model can achieve economies of scale but neglects to account for variability in farm and farmer characteristics. A data-driven approach to incorporate farmer diversity in scaling strategies may help to achieve greater development impact. However, interpreting the multiplicity of smallho...
Future technologies and systemic innovation are critical for the profound transformation the food system needs. These innovations range from food production, land use and emissions, all the way to improved diets and waste management. Here, we identify these technologies, assess their readiness and propose eight action points that could accelerate t...
The production and consumption of livestock products are under examination on environmental, human health and animal welfare grounds. However, a wealth of evidence suggests that the livestock sector has complex interactions with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, with both the problem and solution spaces for livestock interventions varying depen...
The Rural Household Multiple Indicator Survey (RHoMIS) is a standardized farm household survey approach which collects information on 758 variables covering household demographics, farm area, crops grown and their production, livestock holdings and their production, agricultural product use and variables underlying standard socioeconomic and food s...
In West African Sahel, there has been an only limited intensification of the mixed crop and livestock systems due to many constraints faced by smallholder farmers including climate change, low use of external inputs, insecure land tenure, and low adoption of productivity-enhancing technologies. However, the growing demand for food caused by a rapid...
Grazing land models can assess the provisioning and trade-offs among ecosystem services attributable to grazing management strategies. We reviewed 12 grazing land models used for evaluating forage and animal (meat and milk) production, soil C sequestration, greenhouse gas emission, and nitrogen leaching, under both current and projected climate con...
p>Rural households in sub-Saharan Africa earn a substantial part of their living from rain-fed smallholder agriculture, which is highly sensitive to climate change. There is a growing number of multi-level assessments on impacts and adaptation options for African smallholder systems under climate change, yet few studies translate impacts at the ind...
Dairy intensification is a widely used means of achieving food security, improving farmer incomes and enhancing overall economic growth. However, intensification is dependent upon the availability and suitability of natural resources to sustain growth in production. Here, land and water footprints of milk production in three contrasting agro-ecolog...
Our understanding of food security in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has been hampered by limitations in the temporal and spatial representativeness of data. Food balance sheets provide scalable estimates of per capita food availability, but fail to represent food access, stability and their causal linkages. In contrast, rural household surveys represent...
Eradicating hunger is a complex and multifaceted challenge, requiring evidence bases that can inform wide scale action, but that are also participatory and grounded to have local relevance and effectiveness. The Rural Household Multi-Indicator Surveys (RHoMIS) provides a broad assessment of household capabilities and food security outcomes, while e...
Food security is a major challenge in Guatemala, one of the poorest countries in the world. Food insecurity is concentrated in the Western Highlands of Guatemala (WHG) where indigenous communities have been the main victims of social, political and economic marginalization. In this study we characterize the diversity of farming households in the WH...
Over the past four decades, agricultural systems in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) have largely evolved from a subsistence orientation toward commercial production, but the multi-faceted changes behind this evolution vary in substance and degree. Despite connoting economic progress, effects of these changes on household welfare indicators such...
In recent years, agricultural extension services in developing countries have increasingly introduced modern information and communication technologies (ICT) to deliver advice. But to realize efficiency gains, digital applications may need to address heterogeneous information needs by targeting agricultural advisory contents in a household-specific...
Agricultural development must integrate multiple objectives at the same time, including food security, income, and environmental sustainability. To help achieve these objectives, development practitioners need to prioritize concrete livelihood practices to promote to rural households. But trade-offs between objectives can lead to dilemmas in select...
Household-type specific formulae for calculation of a gender equity indicator from RHoMIS data.
(DOCX)
Positive deviant interview guideline.
(DOCX)
RHoMIS survey data of 521 rural households in Tanzania.
Households and locations have been anonymized. Units can be found in Table 1.
(XLSX)
Calculation of household endowments in six resources that may drive different adoption potentials for novel practices and technologies.
(DOCX)
While the commercialization and diversification of agricultural and livestock systems have been identified as key global strategies for climate change adaptation and mitigation, less is known as to the large-scale gendered impacts that are implicated in these transformations among smallholder crop and livestock farmers. This study explores these ge...
Increasing agricultural productivity does not often provide a viable route out of poverty or hunger for the poorest households, because their farms tend to be small with low yield potential. These challenges will be amplified as climate change causes shifting patterns of crop suitability and disease and pest pressures. Off-farm sources of income ar...
Household surveys are one of the most commonly used tools for generating insight into rural communities. Despite their prevalence, few studies comprehensively evaluate the quality of data derived from farm household surveys. We critically evaluated a series of standard reported values and indicators that are captured in multiple farm household surv...
To target food security interventions for smallholder households, decision makers need large-scale information, such as maps on poverty, food security and key livelihood activities. Such information is often based on expert knowledge or aggregated data, despite the fact that food security and poverty are driven largely by processes at the household...
Maps of key indicators using LSMS data from 2010/11 and 2011/12.
Overall patterns of the maps of key indicators for the LSMS data from 2010/11 and 2011/12 were similar with largest differences for food availability (FA) and the cattle contribution.
(PDF)
Difference maps comparing LSMS data from 2010/11 and 2011/12.
Maps from 2011/12 are subtracted from maps from 2010/11. Positive results (green, yellow) indicate that FA or the contribution of the variable in 2010/11 was larger than in 2011/12. Negative results (white) indicate that FA or the contribution of the variable in 2010/11 was smaller than...
Variogram models of the indicators.
(PDF)
Regression coefficients and significance of environmental explanatory variables multiple inflated beta regression model (MIBR-EV) for major crops contributing to the livelihood activity ‘crops’.
(PDF)
Regression coefficients and significance of environmental explanatory variables multiple inflated beta regression model (MIBR-EV) for major livestock groups ‘cattle’ and ‘poultry’ contributing to the livelihood activity ‘livestock’.
(PDF)
Regression coefficients and significance of environmental explanatory variables in multiple inflated beta regression model (MIBR-EV) for the dependent variables ‘crops’, ‘livestock’ and ‘off-farm income’ as livelihood activities contributing to food availability.
(PDF)
Root mean squared error maps comparing LSMS data from 2010/11 and 2011/12.
Root mean squared error was calculated as: √((LSMS201011 − LSMS20112)2). It gives an indication about the spread between the two years. Maps indicate that differences between the two years were locally large (green) for banana and cattle contributions and less for cassava co...
Food availability and livelihood activities as dependent variables for the regression analyses.
(PDF)
Regression coefficients and significance of environmental and household level explanatory variables multiple inflated beta regression model (MIBR-EVHR) for major livestock groups contributing to the livelihood activity ‘livestock’.
(PDF)
Regression coefficients and significance of environmental and household level explanatory variables in multiple inflated beta regression model (MIBR-EVHR) for the dependent variables ‘crops’, ‘livestock’ and ‘off-farm income’ as livelihood activities contributing to food availability.
(PDF)
Regression coefficients and significance of environmental and household level explanatory variables multiple inflated beta regression model (MIBR-EVHR) for major crops contributing to the livelihood activity ‘crops’.
(PDF)
To target food security interventions for smallholder households, decision makers need large-scale information, such as maps on poverty, food security and key livelihood activities. Such information is often based on expert knowledge or aggregated data, despite the fact that food security and poverty are driven largely by processes at the household...
There are large yield gaps in the mixed smallholder farming systems of Africa, with limited opportunities to sustainably increase productivity and adapt to climate change. In this study, the ex-ante potential of residue retention and fertilization measures to meet this challenge is assessed using a positive mathematical programming (PMP) model. Thi...
1. Abstract In this paper we show results of recent household level analyses of smallholder farming systems. We make use of existing databases across a range of low and middle income countries, as well as a substantial quantity of new data collected with the Rural Household Multiple Indicator Survey (RHoMIS), the combined total of this comprising m...
The role of herbivorous livestock in supporting the sustainability of the farming systems in which they are found is complex and sometimes conflicting. In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), the integration of livestock into farming systems is important for sustainable agriculture as the recycling of nutrients for crop production through returns of animal ma...
The livestock sector in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) is evolving. In response to growing demand for livestock products, it is likely that smallholder production systems will experience varying forms of intensification. Associated decision making is made complex, not only with the intrinsic characteristics of livestock in LMICs (for insta...
Farmers in Africa have long adapted to climatic and other risks by diversifying their farming activities. Using a multi‐scale approach we explore the relationship between farming diversity and food security and the diversification potential of African agriculture and its limits on the household and continental scale. On the household scale we use a...
This paper presents the results of field studies conducted in Zimbabwe to quantify the yield response of maize to current and projected climatic conditions. The effect of management practices, such as cultivar choice, planting date and fertilizer use, were evaluated. The long-term impact of these management options was assessed through crop simulat...
