Academic article

This article aims to asses to what extent information and communicative mechanisms of digital platforms facilitate trust building for value chain credit cooperation in smallholder maize farming in Ghana. Digital Platforms (DPs) show potential to help overcome some information and communication gaps that impede traditional value chain credit arrangements. »

These six papers in a special issue of Climate Risk Management presents innovations, insights and evidence from efforts to make climate services work for smallholder farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Identifying the intended users and understanding how their identities, roles and responsibilities within larger agrarian communities to which they belong impact their climate service needs and ability to act on the information provided. »

The aim of this article is to suggest and discuss different development scenarios for organic dairy production, based on data from three East African studies of dairy production at certified organic cash crop farms. The study concludes that there are good possibilities for more local recirculation of feed and manure, although with limited benefits when there are only few animals with short lactations on the farm. »

This article assesses to what extent positive selection over several seasons can reduce six different virus incidences in seed lots of different starting quality in Southwestern Uganda. The results clearly show that crops planted with seeds from positive selection have a reduced virus incidence compared to those from farmers’ selection when the treatments are applied over multiple (in this case, three) seasons, thereby reducing the level of secondary infection in the next-season crop. »

This review summarizes the current techniques used for site-directed genome editing in plants, focusing on the CRISPR/Cas system, and discuss their current and future applications for crop biology. The use of these technologies in crop biology has opened up a new era of genome editing-mediated crop breeding. »

This paper aims to stimulate a discussion of how to raise the farmers’ income by providing another way of looking at prices. Since farmers do not earn a sufficient livelihood, alternative ways than market prices have to be looked at: the ‘fair prices’. »