How do borrowers respond to improvements in a lender’s ability to punish defaulters? We implemented a randomized field experiment in Malawi examining the impact of fingerprinting of borrowers, which improves the lender’s ability to withhold future loans from individuals who have previously defaulted while rewarding good borrowers with increased loan sizes. Study participants were smallholder fa...

Government smallholder irrigation schemes were developed in former homeland areas of South Africa during the apartheid era. Although experiencing serious financial, technical, and institutional problems, most of them are now earmarked for rehabilitation and transfer to water users’ associations. Transfer operators find it difficult to evaluate the potential for viability, then to organise the t...

AIM Disease outbreaks increase the cost of animal production; reduce milk and beef yield, cattle sales, farmers' incomes, and enterprise profitability. The study assessed the economic effects of foot and mouth disease (FMD) outbreaks along the cattle marketing chain in selected study districts in Uganda. MATERIALS AND METHODS The study combined qualitative and quantitative study designs. Resp...

The study presented here considers the relative efficiency of planting tobacco and maize in the tobacco-producing Tabora region of Tanzania. The study used a 2013 survey that was conducted among smallholder farmers in the Tabora region. The aim was to investigate whether farmers are better off planting tobacco or maize. The paper briefly reviews the importance of agriculture in general and toba...

Introduction Policy makers and extension planners often assume smallholder mixed farming systems are incapable of evolving fast enough to meet growing food demands and that livestock are relatively unimportant to household food production or welfare (FDRE, 1994), except for intensive units. The resulting policy promotes substitution of either intensive cropping or livestock production in place ...

The study was aimed at analysing the technical efficiency in maize production of smallholder farmers in central rift valley of Ethiopia. Cross sectional data from 138 maize producer farmers were collected during 2011/12 production season. The estimated results of the Cobb-Douglas frontier model with inefficiency variables shows that the mean technical efficiency of the farmers in the production...

the study assessed the entrepreneurial behaviour of smallholder cassava farmers in ebonyi state, nigeria. multistage sampling technique was employed in the selection of 108 cassava farmers across the agricultural zones in ebonyi state using pretested and structured questionnaire from which data and information were elicited. analytically, the study employed entrepreneurial behavioural index (eb...

the study was conducted among the two farmer groups in bhaktapur and kavre districts of nepal. the main objective of the study is to evaluate the differences in belief, attitude and practices felt by the farmers after participation in the ipm ffs. the study has been based on data collected through personal interview with the farmers, focus group discussion, personal observation in the farmers f...

Smallholding farms spread throughout the world, and they consider cornerstone of agriculture production in Africa Asia. Smallholder produce over 80 % food used most developing countries. However, smallholder farmers face many problems, including lack appropriate mechanization (AM), labor shortage, increase wages, climate change, poor access to modern inputs, credit, markets. The paper focuses o...