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.
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.
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.
The Private Sector Driven Agricultural Growth (PSDAG) project is a five-year (August 2014–August 2019) USAID-funded initiative implemented by International Resources Group, a subsidiary of Research Triangle Institute (RTI) International. The goal of PSDAG is to increase incomes of smallholder farmers by promoting private sector investment through two complementary objectives: (1) to assist the Government of Rwanda to increase private sector investment, and (2) to facilitate increased private sector investment by upgrading agricultural value chains.
This chapter outlines the role of a well-functioning agricultural innovation system in ensuring good use of public funds, and higher responsiveness to the needs of ‘innovation consumers’ through improved collaboration between public and private participants, including across national borders. A well-functioning agricultural innovation system is key to improving the economic, environmental and social performance of the food and agriculture sector.
This presentation argues the need of green growth in agriculture, analyzes features of the innovation systems and ends with some policies practices. The presentation has been prepared for "Innovation and Modernising the Rural Economy", OECD’s 8th Rural Development Policy Conference, 3-5 October 2012 (Krasnoyarsk, Russian Federation).
LenCD has prepared a joint statement on results and capacity development (presented in this publication), which stresses that meaningful, sustainable results are premised on proper investments in capacity development and that these results materialize at different levels and at different times, along countries’ development trajectory. To provide evidence in support of this statement, LenCD launched a call for submission of stories.
African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as this book argues, Africa can feed itself in a generation and help contribute to global food security. To achieve this Africa has to define agriculture as a force in economic growth by: advancing scientific and technological research; investing in infrastructure; fostering higher technical training; and creating regional markets.
The focus of this paper is on how the institutional arrangements within the on-farm sector of the New Zealand dairy industry influence industry participants and encourage them to be innovative, in the context of industry productivity goals. The authors will present and discuss an approach to policy systems analysis that facilitates shared understanding between system participants and enables strategies for change to be identified.