Soil salinization is a significant form of land degradation in agricultural areas. Remote sensing is a better way to assess soil salinity than traditional methods, as it provides non-destructive and repetitive informative assessment for monitoring and mapping soil salinity. Different sensors can identify soil salinity in remote sensing data through direct and indirect indicators. A Brief review of the major soil salinity mapping studies is presented here.

This brochure is a guide for effective sorghum crop management, covering crucial topics such as land preparation, optimal sowing and seeding rates, fertilizer application, thinning and weed management. It highlights the importance of pest management, specifically addressing issues related to shoot fly, stem borer and bird control. Additionally, the brochure offers valuable insights into proper harvesting and post-harvest handling to alleviate storage pest risks.

This brochure is a guide to cultivation of green gram. It provides the ideal climatic conditions for cultivation of the crop, covering aspects such as land preparation, seed rate, sowing, weed control, optimal fertilizer application and harvesting. It provides insights into managing common insect pests and diseases. Emphasizing integrated pest management as an effective environment sensitive approach to pest management, the brochure provides guidance on application of pesticides.

Women play an important role in agriculture and account for around 50% of the agricultural labor force in Asia. Strong evidence exists to prove that women farmers have less access to land, inputs, labor and information compared to men, which, in turn, can influence technical efficiency in farms, that is the effectiveness with which a given set of inputs is used to produce output. Strong reasons indicate that women’s empowerment may contribute to enhancing technical efficiency, most notably through improvements in women’s access to human, physical, and social capital.

Enhancing the productivity of crops through the adoption and uptake of technologies improves farmers' socio-economic status through increased market participation. However, smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) face a myriad of challenges that make it difficult for them to access and participate in the output markets. Like most SSA countries, the uptake of improved technologies is still low in Malawi. This paper examines the relationship between uptake of improved potato seed and donor-funded training on market participation.

Two important risks faced by many smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa are erratic weather patterns and insecure land tenure. It is likely these risks will increasingly interact as projections of more erratic weather make small-scale farming more difficult and demand for rural land grows. This paper asks how farmers in Western Tanzania view these compound risks and the influence this has on levels of investment in adaptive agricultural technologies and the demand for land certification in a lab-in-the-field setting.

Inadequate and poor-quality feed resources constrain livestock production that compromises the livelihoods dependent on livestock in low- and middle-income countries. Several forage varieties have been developed, targeting smallholder farmers in developing countries, yet the level of adoption remains low, particularly among women farmers. Adoption of varieties could enhance livelihoods by increasing livestock productivity and by providing income from the sale of surplus forage. Evidence on gendered barriers to, and incentives for, adoption of forage varieties is scarce.

Research on gender inequality in seed systems has underscored the need to build more inclusive interventions. For gender-transformative (GT) interventions in seed systems to succeed, there is urgent need to test new models which should be guided by empirical evidence. We present findings from research that unraveled the underlying causes that prevent women and youth from actively participating and benefiting as cassava seed entrepreneurs (CSEs). This study underpins the designing and testing of GT interventions as part of the Muhogo Bora cassava seed systems project in Tanzania.

Banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW) is a major threat to banana production in Rwanda, causing up to 100% yield loss. There are no biological or chemical control measures, and little is known about the potential direction and magnitude of its spread; hence, cultural control efforts are reactive rather than proactive. In this study, we assessed BXW risk under current and projected climates to guide early warning and control by applying the maximum entropy (Maxent) model on 1,022 georeferenced BXW datapoints and 20 environmental variables.

Rice is a vital food crop in Tanzania, both for household consumption and commercial retail. Contract farming is an important agricultural tool through which farmers and larger investors are linked to increase production and quality of crops, benefiting both the farmers and investors. This chapter uses the relational model to look at the relationships in two rice contract farming schemes in Tanzania: Kapunga Rice Plantation Limited and Mtenda Kyela Rice Supply. The empirical data is from household surveys and interviews from the Mbeya region in 2015.

Die Parameter für die Ernährung in Afrika verändern sich rasch aufgrund der Urbanisierung, die vom Wachstum von Wirtschaft und Bevölkerung und der Migration vom Land in die Stadt angetrieben wird. Dieser Wandel ist eine Herausforderung für die Ernährungssicherheit und die Nährstoffversorgung in städtischen Gebieten und den Megastädten Afrikas wie Accra, Kinshasa, Lagos und Nairobi, da die Verbraucher zunehmend Arbeit sparende, verarbeitete Lebensmittel verlangen. Mit der Supermarktrevolution werden in den Städten immer mehr erschwingliche hochverarbeitete Lebensmittel angeboten.