Outlook on Agriculture

‘Look at it this way’ features contributions from distinguished scientists on contentious and current issues in areas such as development, population growth, agricultural production and policy.

The impact of possible avenues of climatic change on agriculture was investigated for the province of Alberta on the Canadian prairies. Climate scenarios were based on output from the Canadian Climate Centre Global Circulation Model. In these scenarios, the semi-arid area increased only when temperature increases were not accompanied by an increase in precipitation. Seeding dates for spring wheat advanced by 10–28 days, while harvest dates advanced by 22–37 days. Growing degree days increased by 50% across the region. There was little impact on aridity, indicating the adaptiveness of agriculture through earlier seeding dates. Crop yields increased by 21 to 124%, in part because of the direct effect of high atmospheric CO₂. Our results indicate a positive impact of climate change on crop yields and diversity in Alberta.

A strategy is proposed to develop tactical models describing the management decisions required by a farmer/landowner to implement a temperate agroforestry system. The strategy consists of three phases: evaluation, technical and outreach. The evaluation phase defines the clientele, their needs and the types of agroforestry systems required. The tactical model is constructed, guided by the results of the evaluation phase, in the technical phase. The outreach phase presents the completed model to the clientele. This strategy is a framework that coordinates multidisciplinary activities providing a depth of knowledge about the system's productivity and ensures the relevance of the model by involving farmers as coparticipants in research.

In this paper, an attempt is made to illustrate how sustainable agricultural development can be achieved through the application of a holistic eco-restructuring method (ERM). Before describing the concept of eco-restructuring, its importance and its methodological framework, the derivation and some antecedents of sustainable development, the concept of sustainable development (SD) as an interface between environment and development, and the need for sustainable agricultural development (SAD) are discussed briefly.

Farmers had not adopted new technologies in complex diverse and risk-prone (CDR) agricultural environments. Farmer-participatory research was developed as an alternative to the top-down, transfer of technology approach to agricultural research and extension that had demonstrably failed in marginal areas. However, in more favoured ones, there is also, at best, a significant lag in the adoption of modern technologies and, at worst, the adoption of modern technologies is incomplete. Varieties with wide adaptation are grown in high potential production systems (HPPSs) but this is not a unique property of such systems, because widely adapted varieties are also found in marginal areas. Hence the type of variety grown in high potential and marginal environments does not justify different degrees of farmer participation. The ‘transfer of technology’ extension methods employed in HPPSs use fewer resources than participatory ones developed for marginal areas, but participatory methods can be adapted for HPPSs and made cost-effective. Ongoing research in HPPSs in Nepal and India has shown that production increases when farmers adopt new varieties identified in participatory research. If participatory approaches were widely applied in these systems, they would contribute greatly to the food security of the developing world with its rapidly growing population.

This paper summarizes the relationships between farming family size, food crop production, land and livestock holding of smallholder farmers in mixed farming systems in the Ethiopian highlands. The findings show farming family size, among all the factors studied, to be the single most important factor affecting herd size. Area cultivated and quantity of grain produced were limited only by landholding size. As farm sizes were small, owning animals for traction did not make a difference in the area cultivated and quantity of grain produced. As livestock production in the study area predominantly depends on communal grazing lands, livestock holdings were not influenced by individual landholding or grazing land size. Thus, land size can be a deceptive criterion for identifying small-scale farmers for livestock-related studies and projects, especially where farmers employ extensive methods of livestock production.

The production of cut flowers, nearly all for export, is expanding in numerous African countries. Most of the flowers being grown in Africa are of temperate origin and are exported to Europe during the Northern hemisphere's autumn, winter and spring. The development of production in the tropics has required the adoption of specialized protected structures suitable for the tropics, and this review considers Kenya in detail. The future prospects for cut flower exports are considered, including the exacting production and marketing requirements of the international market, the ethical approach to labour employment, safe use of pesticides, and the sustainable management of the environment. The continued expansion of Africa's cut flower growing requires the industry to remain competitive, which in turn needs political stability, and investment in research and training.