Knowledge Portal

This policy brief analyses the potential of agribusiness to address youth unemployment in Kenya and calls for increased collaboration between agribusiness owners, government and educationalists through entrepreneurship development. Entrepreneurship education and training is vital in preparing young people for the job opportunities that could be available to them and for the evolving nature of the agricultural sector. »

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 book shares new data relating to Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA), with emphasis on experiences in Eastern and Southern Africa to answer key questions on the following five topic areas: (1) Climate impacts; (2) Climate-smart varieties; (3) Farm management; (4) Value chains; and (5) Scaling up. The papers illustrate, among other things, how practitioners can access free online tools,how new varieties of crops or better soil management can help farmers adapt; how information networks or entrepreneurial training can help the spread of promising technologies; how private-sector firms can promote CSA; and how farmer-to-farmer training can help bring CSA to scale. »

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’. »