Agricultural Administration最新文献

Common property resources form a major agricultural resource base in the villages of Sri Lanka, but they have deteriorated in recent years. This research study was conducted in two districts of Sri Lanka to investigate the major causes of the erosion of the common property resources. The irregular felling of trees for timber, clearing and the burning of forests for rainfed rotational cultivation were evident in the study villages. The over-grazing of the communal pastures is not a serious problem due to the low cattle/buffalo population. The income from the common property resources is significant in the drier districts.

This paper discusses the case study method as a useful and cost-effective addition to the range of research tools used in multidisciplinary farming systems research. The case study method provides information that would be hard to obtain by other means, as well as an opportunity for close collaboration between social scientists, natural scientists and farmers. Practical problems include selection and representativeness; data and data collection; analysis and reporting; and follow-up. The argument is illustrated with an example from Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

Although farmer participation is an important concept in farming systems programs, farmer participation is typically restricted to the management of on-farm trials and little information exists on alternative approaches. This paper evaluates three approaches to farmer participation differentiated by the extent to which farmers participated in defining criteria for the design of on-farm fertilizer trials. The three methodologies are described, and the resultant experimental designs are compared in terms of their criteria for testing fertilizers under small farm conditions. The results show that increased scope for farmer participation produced significant changes in the design of on-farm trials due to important insights into how farmers themselves would evaluate fertilizers, and raised basic research questions about improvements in the technology. The paper concludes that farmer participation in experimental design for on-farm trials requires fewer resources and less time than diagnostic survey research while qualitatively improving feedback between scientists and farmers.

Educational development plans in Third World countries have stressed the need to develop the economic, social and political potential of their population through a public education system that has emphasized rural development. A case study of the educational system in Ethiopia from 1942 to 1974, a country where more than 85 per cent of the population lives in the rural areas, revealed that the educational system was geared towards urban development and neglected the rural sector. Hence, Ethiopian education was characterized by the concentration of educational resources in urban areas and selected regions, under-representation of female students in schools and in the labor force, and preparation of students for work in urban white-collar positions, positions which provided limited employment.

A shortage of adequately trained agricultural extension workers has been one of the limiting factors in establishing a viable agricultural extension service in the southern region of Sudan. In an effort to more effectively train their extension personnel, the Regional Ministry of Agriculture, with US AID support, established the Southern Manpower Development Project. The authors describe one segment of that project—the revitalization of the Rumbek Agricultural Training Centre (RATC). This revitalization process began with an evaluation of existing extension training conditions. The evaluation resulted in six major changes that were implemented at the RATC. The collective impact of these six changes resulted in the emergence of a curriculum which could become a model curriculum for other institutions with similar missions.

Rural poverty is much less a problem of total food availability than of who produces the food and who has the income to buy it. A high priority is therefore to enable the tens of millions of resource-poor farm families to increase their production and improve its stability. The normal ‘transfer-of-technology’ (TOT) model for agricultural research has built-in biases which favour resource-rich farmers whose conditions resemble those of research stations. TOT approaches have been modified through on-farm trials and demonstrations but the basic model and approach remain the same. A second emerging model is ‘farmer-first-and-last’ (FFL). This starts and ends with the farm family and the farming system. It begins with holistic and interdisciplinary appraisal of farm families' resources, needs and problems, and continues with on-farm and with-farmer R and D, with scientists, experiment stations and laboratories in a consultancy and referral rôle. FFL fits the needs and opportunities of resource-poor farm families better than TOT, but there are obstacles to its development and introduction. These can be tackled step-by-step, through combinations of methodological innovation, interdisciplinarity, including the social sciences, and provision of suitable resources, rewards and training. FFL approaches promise a greater contribution from agricultural research to the eradication of rural poverty.

In spite of the remarkable long-term stability, at the national level, of the share of the land in France under owner-operation, at about one half of farmland, there have been regional changes, with tenancy increasing in mostly owner-occupied areas and owner-occupation increasing in mostly rented areas. Intra-family tenancy has developed at the expense of renting from outside landlords. This has come about in part because of the tenancy regulations, set up since 1946, which are very favourable to tenants. The decline of the traditional landlord has led to the quest for a new type of corporate landlord: Groupements Fonciers Agricoles, have been introduced but are still of minor importance.