Farming system research

Know your men and women farmers: Ensuring host farmers in participatory trials represent heterogeneity within the target environment

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, …

Tailoring interventions through a combination of statistical typology and frontier analysis: a study of mixed crop-livestock farms in semi-arid Zimbabwe

CONTEXT. in Zimbabwe, farm productivity of smallholder farmers practising mixed crop-livestock farming is hindered by climate variability, inadequate nutritious feeds, poor soil fertility, and resource trade-offs. Despite these challenges, positive …

Supporting biodiversity-smart smallholder farming in Africa through systems agronomy

We are facing a biodiversity crisis, which is largely driven by the way we produce food. In response, various approaches to ‘biodiversity-smart farming’ have been proposed, sparking debates, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that was largely …

Validating a novel genetic technology for hybrid maize seed production under management practices associated with resource-poor farmers in Zimbabwe

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 …

Tailoring interventions through a combination of statistical typology and frontier analysis: a study of mixed crop-livestock farms in semi-arid Zimbabwe

An innovative methodological approach combining statistical typologies and stochastic frontier analysis was applied to data collected from 1840 mixed crop-livestock farms in six districts of Zimbabwe, representative of semi-arid areas of the country. …

Projecting the contribution of provitamin A maize biofortification and other nutrition interventions to the nutritional adequacy and cost of diets in rural Zimbabwe

Background. Evidence of the effectiveness of biofortified maize with higher provitamin A (PVA) to address vitamin A deficiency in rural Africa remains scant. Objectives: This study projects the impact of adopting PVA maize for a diversity of …

Do provisioning ecosystem services change along gradients of increasing agricultural production?

Context - Increasing agricultural production shapes the flow of ecosystem services (ES), including provisioning services that support the livelihoods and nutrition of people in tropical developing countries. Although our broad understanding of the …

The input reduction principle of agroecology is wrong when it comes to mineral fertilizer use in sub-Saharan Africa

Can farmers in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) boost crop yields and improve food availability without using more mineral fertilizer? This question has been at the center of lively debates among the civil society, policy-makers, and in academic editorials. …

Construction of a generalised farm typology to aid selection, targeting and scaling of onfarm research

Farm typologies are often used to reduce the complexity in categorising diverse farming systems, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The resulting typologies can then be used in multiple ways including designing efficient sampling schemes that …

Pathways to wheat self-sufficiency in Africa

A growing urban population and dietary changes increased wheat import bills in Africa to 9% per year. Though wheat production in the continent has been increasing over the past decades, to varying degrees depending on regions, this has not been …