This is the proceedings of the international conference ‘Innovations in Organic Food System for Sustainable Production and Enhanced Ecosystem Services’. The proceedings are a compilation of peer-reviewed articles based on presentations of 18 speakers invited conference speakers and published as a Special Issue of the scientific journal ‘Sustainable Agriculture Research’ by the Canadian Centre of Science and Education.
The creative process that leads to farmers’ innovations is rarely studied or described precisely in agricultural sciences. For academic scientists, obvious limitations of farmers’ experiments are e.g. precision, reliability, robustness, accuracy, validity or the correct analysis of cause and effect. Nevertheless, we propose that ‘farmers’ experiments’ underpin innovations that keep organic farming locally tuned for sustainability and adaptable to changing economic, social and ecological conditions.
Farmers’ experiments can be defined as the autonomous activities of farmers to try or introduce something new at the farm, and include evaluation of success or failure with farmers’ own methods. Experiments enable farmers to adapt their farms to changing circumstances, build up local knowledge, and have resulted in countless agricultural innovations. Most research on the topic has been conducted in countries of the south.
Organic farming is recognized as one source for innovation helping agriculture to develop sustainably. However, the understanding of innovation in agriculture is characterized by technical optimism, relying mainly on new inputs and technologies originating from research. The paper uses the alternative framework of innovation systems describing innovation as the outcome of stakeholder interaction and examples from the SOLID (Sustainable Organic Low-Input Dairying) project to discuss the role of farmers, researchers and knowledge exchange for innovation.
This report is concerned with the ‘who?’ ‘what?’ and ‘how?’ of pro-poor extension. It builds on the analytical framework proposed in the Inception Report of the same study (Christoplos, Farrington and Kidd, 2001), taking it forward by fleshing out the analysis with empirical information gathered from several countries during the course of the study (from primary data in Bolivia, Colombia, Nicaragua, Uganda and Vietnam, and from secondary sources in a range of other countries, including India), and drawing conclusions on the scope for action by governments and donors in a range of contexts.
This report assesses trends in investments, human resource capacity, and research outputs in agricultural R&D -excluding the private (for-profit) sector- in LAC. It is an update of Stads and Beintema (2009), covering a more complete set of countries and focusing primarily on developments during 2006-2012/2013.
Traditional approaches to innovation systems policymaking and governance often focus exclusively on the central provision of services, regulations, fiscal measures, and subsidies.
The Sourcebook is the outcome of joint planning, continued interest in gender and agriculture, and concerted efforts by the World Bank, FAO, and IFAD. The purpose of the Sourcebook is to act as a guide for practitioners and technical staff inaddressing gender issues and integrating gender-responsive actions in the design and implementation of agricultural projects and programs. It speaks not with gender specialists on how to improve their skills but rather reaches out to technical experts to guide them in thinking through how to integrate gender dimensions into their operations.
The purposes of this course are to review the major reforms being considered internationally that aim to change the policy and institutional structure and operations of public sector agricultural extension systems, and to examine the advantages and disadvantages of each of these reforms as illustrated by the selected case studies. Aside from the introductory chapter, the course is organized into nine modules, which are conceived as part of a larger framework.
According to the authors of this paper, actual methods of scaling are rather empirical and based on the premise of ‘find out what works in one place and do more of the same, in another place’. These methods thus would not sufficiently take into account complex realities beyond the concepts of innovation transfer, dissemination, diffusion and adoption. As a consequence, scaling initiatives often do not produce the desired effect.