The article describes the influence of a disease control scheme (the Norfolk-Suffolk Bovine Viral Diarrhoea Disease (BVD) Eradication scheme) on farmers' bio-security attitudes and behaviours. In 2010, a survey of 100 cattle farmers (53 scheme members vs. 47 out of scheme farmers) was undertaken among cattle farmers residing in Norfolk and Suffolk counties in the UK. A cross-sectional independe...

Smallholder farmers have two basic decisions to make regarding selling their surplus produce: selling at farmgate at low prices or travelling to a market centre where higher prices are offered while incurring some transaction costs. Whichever decision is made has implications for poverty alleviation efforts. Previous studies have ignored modelling participation and market choice simultaneously....

To date, research on collaborative watershed management has paid scant attention to the role of grassroots stakeholders, who are the people that actually use natural resources. This paper argues cooperation from grassroots stakeholders is necessary for the success of collaborative management, and outlines three theoretical perspectives to explain cooperation. The validity of these theoretical p...

The free distribution of seeds and tools is the standard approach to agricultural recovery. The predominance of this approach is partly attributable to the: (1) perception that farmer seed quality is poor, (2) insistence on seed certification, (3) promotion of researcher varieties, (4) misdiagnosis of unavailability, (5) difficulty accessing farmer seed, and (6) support for the commercial seed ...

Understanding farmer behaviour and drivers for change will be the key to bringing about practice change, such as increasing management enhancement of native biodiversity on-farm. Farmer participation in protection is a critical challenge both national conservation outcomes achieving more sustainable farm systems.

Linking knowledge to action requires understanding how decision-makers conceptualize sustainability. This paper empirically analyzes farmer "mental models" of sustainability from three winegrape-growing regions of California where local extension programs have focused on sustainable agriculture. The mental models are represented as networks where sustainability concepts are nodes, and links are...

This article is the outcome of an empirical study of technical training of women and men through Farmer Field Schools in rural Nepal during the last decade. When the Farmer Field Schools started in Nepal as part of the FAO Integrated Pest Management project in 1997, this was also the year that the Maoists declared the People’s Revolution. The article describes the increased participation of wom...

Agriculture information is the source of energy from which farmer will gain power in decision making. Finding the right approach to providing information to empower farmers is vital due to the high failure rate in current agricultural information systems. As most farmers now have mobile phones we developed a mobile based information system. We used participatory action research methodology to e...

A study is presented which assesses agricultural production in a Purchase Land area over a seven-year period and tries to identify certain socio-psychological and other variables which might be acting as constraints on farming behavior in terms of change. A survey was conducted of the whole population of 198 resident farm families; it included six questionnaires. Subjects covered included agric...