Agricultural Administration最新文献

It has been suggested that a major issue that affects the adoption of new farming practices, particularly in subsistance farming areas, is the additional risk and uncertainty associated with them. A mathematical programming-decision theory framework is used to evaluate the impacts of price and yield variations on the profitability of possible production or management alternatives available to typical small farmers in Sri Lanka. The results indicate that more traditional management plans are generally inferior to more profitable plans that utilize improved rice varieties, increased levels of fertilizer and irrigation water, and greater cultivation of higher value cash crops. The results also suggest that available management skills, limited capital, and the unreliability or lack of confidence in cash crop markets influence Sri Lankan farmers' management plan decisions more than considerations of price and yield variability.

The purpose of this paper is to relate social strata membership and viable objectives for smallholder programs. The first section of the paper introduces the farming systems approach. The next section explains subsistence and commodity producing enterprises. This distinction is essential to the conceptual framework from which policy implications can be derived. Three principal strata of smallholders are identified—petty commodity producers, peasants, and semiproletarians—and a comparison of the main features of their enterprises is facilitated by a set of flow diagrams. These distinctions permit the identification of viable policy objectives, so that farming systems programs can implement strata-specific mechanisms to achieve national objectives and to benefit producers.

In Part 1 of this paper it was argued that farm management had a potential role in facilitating farmers' and extension workers' communication about the adoption and management of technical innovations. The second part addresses the main constraint inhibiting the development of this role: the lack of appropriate farm management tools suitable for use by extension workers advising smallholder farmers. Management decisions are analysed in terms of a theory of human problem-solving in order to show that decision rules may provide a basis for developing formal management techniques more appropriate to smallholder agriculture. Smallholder farm systems in northern Malawi are described and their management modelled using sets of decision rules in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of these rules as management tools. The concluding section discusses briefly some of the implications of adopting decision rules as management and communication aids in extension and research.

This paper is an account of a typical, integrated rural development project. Beginning on a small scale in a remote part of Bunduni with the intervention of some Swiss volunteers, the pilot project successfully improved the beneficiaries' living conditions by the introduction of anti-erosion measures, a water supply and an informal credit scheme. Attracted by this success, the World Bank supported the Bunduni Government in incorporating the same features into a national rural development project. On this scale, the project made slow progress: the original concept had to be reformulated after three years, some elements had to be dropped, and the project period had to be extended. While most of the project targets in terms of physical infrastructure were met, the improvements in the living standards of the project beneficiaries were negligible, and, after the project ended, conditions reverted to the way they had been before the project.

Despite a long period of creditable performance, agriculture remains one of the weakest sectors in the Soviet economy. To increase production of high q

This paper analyses aspects of the operation and effects of the T&V extension system. Specific questions related to the supply of, and demand for, extension agents' (VEW) visits, the presence or absence of farm size bias in VEW visits, seasonal and longer-term variations in the pattern of VEW visits, the relative importance of the VEW as a source of information to farmers, and the crop yields obtained by farmers with different main sources of agricultural advice are addressed. The analysis is based on empirical evidence from India. In particular, data collected and reported by several state government monitoring and evaluation units are used in conjunction with data collected during a detailed case study of T&V extension conducted by the World Bank in collaboration with the Haryana Agricultural University at Hissar. The paper draws the following main conclusions. Most (85 per cent) contact farmers are visited regularly, and the majority of non-contact farmers also have some interaction with VEWs, suggesting that the supply of extension services is adequate. Although a statistically significant bias in favour of larger farmers is detected in the pattern of VEW visits, the absolute size of this bias is very small. VEWs appear to be more active in the dry season than in the rainy season, which may be attributable to the past tendency of the research system to concentrate on irrigated crop technology. As experience with the T&V system increases, contact farmers appear to receive fewer visits from VEWs, but visits to non-contact farmers increase. Overall there is an increase in the absolute number of farmers receiving visits from extension agents. VEWs play a more important role as disseminators of information in areas operating the T&V system than in areas relying on the older community development system of extension. The role of the VEW also increases in importance the more expensive or costly the recommended cropping practice. Finally, crop yields of farms that rely on the VEW as the main source of information are higher than those of farms that rely mainly on other sources of information. The yields in farms that depend on other sources do not appear to differ greatly from one another but, in terms of crop yields, information from any source appears to be better than none.

Poor loan repayment in developing countries has become a major problem in agricultural credit administration, especially to smallholders who have limited collateral capabilities. This paper therefore examines the determinants of smallholder loan repayment among the clientele farmers of the Ondo State Agricultural Credit Corporation in Nigeria. Four major determinants were identified, which had tremendous effect on the loan repayment performance of the farmers, as demonstrated by their significant correlation to repayment rate. These factors were the nature and the timeliness of loan disbursement, the number of supervisory visits by credit officers and the profitability of the enterprise on which loan funds were invested. This empirical evidence tends to suggest that agricultural loan repayment by farmers in a developing economy such as Nigeria could be vastly improved through careful management of these four major determinants.