technological innovations

This webinar by Agriculture Finance Support Facility’s (AgriFin) looks at the role of digital infrastructures in driving efficiency and sustainability in the agricultural value chain. It dives into issues that surround emerging innovations, capacity strengthening, and the enabling environment of mobile service banking. »

This issue of ICT Update portrays how GODAN and other stakeholders are creating a global open data movement in agriculture and nutrition from the perspectives of its users by showcasing some of the best practices and the most common challenges in this field. There is a lot potential, but lack of reliable and contextualised data is currently working against smallholder farmers. »

This article demonstrates the potential to track smallholder maize yield variation in western Kenya, using a combination of 1-m imagery and intensive field sampling on thousands of fields over 2 years. The emergence of satellite sensors that can routinely observe millions of individual smallholder farms raises possibilities for monitoring and understanding agricultural productivity in many regions of the world. »

This paper by CIMMYT argues that successful agricultural interventions require social shifts, not just technological. Traditionally, agricultural research organizations measured impact by the number of technologies developed, with less attention given to whether or not these technologies were adopted by farmers and the impact they had in communities. Currently, research and extension approaches based on agricultural innovation systems are becoming more popular. »

This conference paper examines the impact of the Wheat Initiative technology package promoted by the research and extension systems in Ethiopia on wheat yield. The results suggest that the full-package farmers had around 14% higher yields. Implementation of the Wheat Initiative was successful in terms of making certified seed and fertilizer accessible and increasing uptake, though only 61 percent of the intervention group adopted row planting and few farmers received marketing assistance. »

This special of Agricultural Systems focuses on prioritising climate-smart agricultural (CSA) interventions at different scales. Currently, there are few tools that can comprehensively evaluate the range of potential technologies and practices and their possible impacts on food production, environmental sustainability, and mitigation in any context. Therefore, what remains is the prioritization of interventions for investment and broad dissemination. This special issue brings together nine papers describing a wide range of approaches and tools. »