Growing Fruit in Dry and Degraded Soils
In a video shared with Grow Further, Charles Mwangi and his partners spell out a clear and present danger to smallholder agriculture. “Declining soil quantity and quality in large parts […]
Smallholder Farm Innovation: Trends to Watch in 2023
What will 2023 hold for smallholder farm innovation? Several non-profit organizations, agribusiness concerns, and consultancies are offering new predictions. Their forecasts are wide-ranging, but most say global food insecurity will […]
Could Smallholder Dairy Farmers Make Money in the Carbon Markets?
Carbon credit trading is already a multi-billion-dollar global industry. Figuring out how to tie struggling smallholder dairy farmers into the ever-expanding market for carbon offsets could open up vast sums […]
Plotting a Digital Farm Revolution in Nine Countries Across the Asia-Pacific
What might it take to digitize smallholder farms across the Asia-Pacific region? An international alliance of agricultural scientists is now busy trying to answer that very question. “Digitization” is, of […]
Stopping the Fall Armyworm Invasion
This pest’s name derives from how it attacks farmers’ fields: in a scorched-earth manner the way an army might. It attacks nearly any food plant but has a special taste […]
Machine Learning to Illuminate Smallholder Farmers’ Problems
As any social scientist who has worked in rural areas of developing countries, including our founder, can tell you, data that inform policy decisions affecting smallholder farmers are anything but […]
Oil Palm Gives Smallholders an Economic Lift, but at What Cost?
A decade ago, this author had the pleasure of touring a region of smallholder oil palm farms in northeastern Colombia, the Catatumbo. This wasn’t your typical rural farm tour, however. […]
A Union of African Universities Supporting Smallholder Farmers
Smallholder farms dominate African agriculture but have long been relatively neglected in international development circles. Global interest in Africa is increasing, and African universities possess an enormous well of talent. […]
Community Seed Banks are Quickly Becoming Mainstream
Farmers have been storing, repurposing, and even sharing seeds for thousands of years. Formal public seed banks to preserve important seeds may have existed as early as ancient Persia. In […]
Bringing Advice to the Smallholder Farm with Online Maps
Smallholder farmers often face harsh or idiosyncratic growing conditions, and techniques developed for optimal conditions often don’t work. But information technology is starting to help. Geomapping tools have convinced banks […]
