Rice is the staple food in Tamil Nadu and is grown in an area of 2.6 Mha with a production of 8.19 Mt and productivity of 3.2 t/ha. In the context of high water demand by rice farmers, any strategy that would produce higher rice yield with less water is the need of the day. One such system is “System of Rice Intensification” (SRI), which was developed by Fr. Henri de Laulanie in Madagascar in 1...

Over the last few decades the nature of farming has changed dramatically with small labour intensive farms being replaced by large, highly automated farms. With this change in the way things are done comes a new concern for animal welfare. Traditionally a skilled stock-man would look after a relatively small number of animals and have much direct contact with them on a daily basis. On the moder...

Cage culture plays an important role in achieving higher output and generating more export earnings in Malaysia. However, the cost of fingerlings, feed and labour have increased substantially for cage culture in the coastal areas in Peninsular Malaysia. This paper uses farm level data gathered from Manjung, Perak and Kota Tinggi, Johor to investigate the technical efficiency of brackish water f...

Increasing problems of rural unemployment in Indonesia are at the core of this report. Numbers of unemployed increased dramatically after the 1997 economic crisis and millions of people searched to be reabsorbed in rural labour markets. Agricultural land is scarce, however, and entry barriers are often high in non-farm businesses. Access to capital and information is limited for the rural poor ...

There is strong advocacy for agricultural machinery appropriate for smallholder farmers in South Asia. Such 'scale-appropriate' machinery can increase returns to land and labour, although the still substantial capital investment required can preclude smallholder ownership. Increasing machinery demand has resulted in relatively well-developed markets for rental services for tillage, irrigation, ...

Fish farming is promoted in the Republic of Benin to meet demands fish consumption and increase exports neighbouring countries. Targeting farm policy interventions efficiency heterogeneous systems a challenge. Farm type delineation allows for simplifying diversity systems. Multivariate statistical techniques combined with Calinski Harabasz pseudo F statistic bootstrapping were applied determine...

The aim of the research was to assess production potential vegetable sector, as a factor competitiveness, in Poland and selected EU countries. evaluation based on comparative analysis level changes land area devoted crops, yields, number farms average crops farm, species structure basic resources factors farm from FADN system. has shown that Poland’s high growing position results mainly acreage...

This short paper considers the poverty impacts of livelihood diversification and the potential challenges of creating a pro-poor rural non-farm economy (RNFE). Rural diversification can be defined as economic development of non-agricultural activities or a livelihood which has multiple, part-time components. It can be associated with a booming or recessionary economy or with accumulating or imm...

Intensified livestock production is considered as a promising pathway for smallholder farmers. Nevertheless, this may entail prohibitive investment requirements of labour, capital or trade-offs at farm level that preclude sustainable intensification. We used fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) to assess farmers' perceptions changes in the household system resulting from adding their mixed farms. Farm...

The paper assesses the extent to which sampling variation affects findings about Malmquist productivity change derived using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), in the first stage calculating productivity indices and in the second stage investigating the farm-specific change in productivity. Confidence intervals for Malmquist indices are constructed using Simar and Wilson’s (1999) bootstrapping pr...