Pig production plays an important role in smallholder farming systems in upland villages of Lao PDR. It serves as an income source or as capital accumulation needed when crop (rice) production fails. Farmers raise pigs in many ways or systems depending on the availability of feed resources and the intensity of farming systems. There are two main problems in smallholder systems—disease and seaso...

Women play a significant role in smallholder production system in Pakistan. They actively participate in various activities relating to crop and livestock production in addition to conducting their routine domestic duties often working non-stop from dawn to dusk. But the extent of their participation varies from region to region. The aim of this field survey was to investigate the involvement o...

to measure an unbiased farm-specific efficiency of individual dairy farmers, a shadow-price profit frontier adjusted for market distortion was applied to a sample of 860 iranian small intensive dairy farms surveyed in 2005-2006. this measure was then compared with that of unadjusted measure that assumes undistorted market. a multiple general linear model (glm) technique was applied to the data ...

Sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions of the world are dominated by smallholder farms, which are characterized by small, heterogeneous, and often indistinct field patterns. In previous work, we developed an algorithm for mapping both smallholder and commercial agricultural fields that includes efficient extraction of a vast set of simple, highly correlated, and interdependent features...

Agriculture is the human enterprise that is most vulnerable to climate change. Tropical agriculture, particularly subsistence agriculture is particularly vulnerable, as smallholder farmers do not have adequate resources to adapt to climate change. While agroforestry may play a significant role in mitigating the atmospheric accumulation of greenhouse gases (GHG), it also has a role to play in he...

The study was designed to ascertain priorities of smallholder oil palm producers in Ika local government area. One hundred and twenty randomly selected farmers were used. Data were collected by the use of structured interview schedule and analysed using meanscore, percentage and factor analysis. The study showed that smallholder oil palm producers constituted of farmers with mean age of 56year,...

Decent work concept is based on four pillars namely employment, employment rights,social dialogue, social security. The uptake of decent work practices in smallholder dairy farms is poorly understood. This paper explores the linkage between socioeconomic status of smallholder farmer and compliance to decent work standards. The study involved 123 farmers. Three index scales were constructed to m...

This paper provides empirical evidence on the impact on technical inefficiency of smallholder dairy producers when they formally participate in a milk supply chain. Here the stochastic production frontier and technical inefficiency effects model are estimated based on the data gathered from 800 smallholder dairy farms in Pakistan. The results suggest that the technical inefficiency of the parti...

Distributed irrigation systems are those in which the water access (via pump or human power), distribution (via furrow, watering can, sprinkler, drip lines, etc.), and use all occur at or near the same location. Distributed systems are typically privately owned and managed by individuals or groups, in contrast to centralized irrigation systems, which tend to be publicly operated and involve lar...

1 This article demonstrates how Integrated Agricultural Research for Development (IAR4D) impacts on collective marketing among smallholder farmers of southern Africa through increased crop productivity, yields and income. We use a quasi-experimental design to compare outcomes under IAR4D and under two other states namely conventional approach and non-intervention. The study relies on primary da...