Balmford and colleagues recently argued that yield maximization and land sparing are key to reducing biodiversity loss. Complementing the response from Beillouin and colleagues, this paper critiques such yield-centred approaches from an agricultural …
Introduction - Forests support crucial ecosystem services globally, and contribute to the livelihoods of millions of people,but are threatened by agricultural expansion and intensification.Yet the relationship between forest cover and agricultural …
Smallholder maize production in sub-Saharan Africa is constrained by soil fertility decline and erratic rainfall, leading to low dietary diversity. A four-season on-farm study (2018/2019–2021/2022) was conducted with six farmers in Murehwa District, …
While conservation agriculture (CA) has been widely evaluated for its biogeochemical effects (e.g soil organic carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emissions) for climate mitigation, its biogeophysical impacts related to changes in surface albedo …
Acid soils are widespread across sub-Saharan Africa. Agricultural lime can be used to alleviate production constraints associated with soil acidity, but lime is not widely available in the region, and it is unclear if applying it would be profitable. …
There is growing interest in participatory varietal selection and gender-responsive breeding in research and development initiatives. On-farm testing is increasingly used to ensure that new varieties perform within the target environments. However, …
Problem. Semi-arid regions of sub-Saharan Africa are characterized by highly variable rainfall and low inherent soil fertility. Maize-cowpea intercropping may offer the prospect of increasing and stabilizing crop productivity in these regions. …
The drive to mechanize and modernize African agriculture is in high gear, making the need for empirical evidence to guide mechanization investments critical. This paper assesses the heterogenous and distributional correlates of using mechanization …
Understanding the performance of new genetic technologies in farmers' realworld realities, especially those relevant to resource-poor farmers, is often overlooked but is essential to ensure equitable benefits. A new genetic technology was developed …