Despite their recognized agricultural sustainability benefits, mixed crop-livestock farms have declined in the Northern hemisphere. As such, crop-livestock integration beyond the farm level is a promising alternative to this trend, but the knowledge of critical factors and strategies towards its successful implementation is still lacking. We developed an analytical framework to assess the critical determinants of the emergence and outcomes of integration, which helped us understand farmers’ collective strategies for reducing integration transaction costs.

Land use decision making requires knowledge integration from a wide range of stakeholders across science and practice. Many participatory methods and instruments aiming at such science-practice interaction have been developed during the last decades. However, there are methodological challenges, and little evidence neither about the methodological applicability and practicability under diverse socio-political conditions nor about their dynamics. The objective of this paper is to offer some insights on the design and implementation of reasonable science-practice interaction.

The lack of land ownership can discourage agricultural technology adoption, yet there is scarce evidence of the impact of land rental contracts on the adoption of improved crop varieties in developing countries. The current study investigates such impact using a nationally representative survey of Ethiopian maize farmers. In contrast to many previous studies, we show in a simple model that cash-renters are as likely to adopt improved maize varieties as owner-operators, while sharecroppers are more likely to adopt given that such varieties are profitable.