Development of technology and extension for small-scale fish farms in northeast Thailand.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Fish Farming ◽  
Appropriate Technology ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Northeast Thailand ◽  
Research Partnership ◽  
Fine Mesh ◽  
Extension System ◽  
Freshwater Aquaculture ◽  
Resource Poor

Abstract This case study was prepared as part of an Asian Development Bank (ADB) Special Evaluation Study on Small-Scale Freshwater Rural Aquaculture for Poverty Reduction. It was specifically prepared with the intention to examine the processes in developing appropriate technology options for small-scale fish farming, and to assess the relevance and role of extension for resource poor fish farmers, by drawing on non-ADB experiences of cooperative efforts to develop technology and extension for small-scale household level fish farming. The Aqua Outreach Programme (AOP) of the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) and the Department of Fisheries (DOF) of Thailand undertook these cooperative efforts. These have taken place in northeast Thailand, the poorest region of the country, and have involved partnerships with a range of local government agencies and non-government organizations (NGOs), and farmers. Freshwater aquaculture is relatively new in northeast Thailand (Setboonsarng, 1994). Although aquaculture is increasing, most of the increase is by better-off farmers, especially in peri-urban areas, and aquaculture remains underdeveloped in most rural areas. The first major aim of the research partnership between DOF and the AOP was to develop appropriate technology for poor farmers in resource poor areas of Asia, with northeast Thailand as a pilot area, because of its marginal characteristics. The research partnership proceeded along a learning curve as it developed appropriate technology and extension for small-scale farmers in resource-poor areas. Assessment of impact of the piloted initiatives demonstrated that the technologies produced by the research had relevance for pro-poor aquaculture under social and economic conditions prevailing at the time the research was carried out. The technologies comprised nursing fish fry to large fingerlings in hapas (fine mesh net cages) in the farmer's pond, and supplementing buffalo manure with urea for pond fertilization for growout (farming of seed fish to market size) following stocking of large fingerlings in fish ponds. As the Thai economy expanded rapidly, a more productive growout technology was piloted as the opportunity cost of labour, and therefore of remaining labour on-farm, had risen. This consisted of hapa nursing followed by growout of sex-reversed Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) in an inorganically fertilized pond. A distance extension system was piloted because of the absence of a conventional aquaculture extension system.

scholarly journals MOTIVATIONS AND RESOURCES OF SMALL-SCALE FARMERS FOR STAYING IN THEIR VILLAGE IN NORTHEAST THAILAND

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 35
Author(s):  
Masatoshi Uehara
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Worth Living ◽  
Northeast Thailand ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
Small Scale Farmers ◽  
Decision To Stay ◽  
Profit Maximisation ◽  
The Village

This study aims to examine one simple question: Why do some small-scale farmers in rural, northeast Thailand keep staying on in their villages despite the fact that they could earn a much higher income if they worked in urban areas? To answer this question, this study which is based on first-hand observations from nine years of intensive fieldwork in rural, northeast Thailand provides a detailed description of the small-scale farmers’ resources that enable them to sustain a living and also provides them motivations to stay in their village. The decision to stay on in the village and forgo the option to move out in pursuit of a higher income may seem irrational in the opinion of economists. However, the author, by employing the “capability approach” argument by A. Sen, argues that their behaviour could be understood as efforts of pursuing “lives worth living” (as expressed in his later work as an architect of the UN’s “human security” program) and not solely profit maximisation. Their efforts include establishing “community groups” and practising “sustainable agriculture” including “organic farming” and “integrated farming”. These activities are well-suited to their natural environments and economic conditions and, at the same time, give them autonomy in their villages.

The Role of Small-Scale Farming in Familial Care

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-109
Author(s):  
Shinsuke Tomita ◽  
Mario Ivan Lopez ◽  
Yasuyuki Kono
Keyword(s):  
Market Economy ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Rural Households ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Rice Farming ◽  
Northeast Thailand ◽  
Employment Opportunities ◽  
Working Age

At present, Thailand’s market economy is placing pressure on familial care within rural households. An increasing amount of people are making their living in the current market economy and moving to urban areas in search of employment. The provisioning of care has come under greater risk, especially for women and couples of working age who are exposed to the possibilities of losing employment opportunities. While caregiving has been a responsibility of the household, shifts in working patterns have weakened its ability to care for children and the elderly. However, the capacity to care in northeast Thailand is still higher than in other regions of the country. This article discusses the balancing act that takes place between a progressive market economy and familial care as provided within households in northeast Thailand to demonstrate the importance that rice farming plays in familial care even if income from farming is limited.

Experiences and lessons learned from six years of government-led inland aquaculture development projects in northwest Namibia, 2004-2009.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Panduleni Ndinelago Elago
Keyword(s):  
Poverty Reduction ◽  
Fish Farming ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Fish Farms ◽  
Extension Services ◽  
Freshwater Aquaculture ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Government ◽  
Aquaculture Development

Abstract The Government of Namibia addresses food security and poverty reduction through the development of rural sectors, including fisheries and aquaculture. Freshwater aquaculture is recognized as a potential target for sustainable development. The Government of Namibia, together with the Government of Spain signed an agreement in 2003 to establish the Inland Aquaculture Centre (IAC), to demonstrate the possibilities of fish farming activities in the northwest of Namibia and in the country at large. Seven hundred new small-scale fish farms (SSFF's) were identified to participate in fish farming activities. Around 300+ farmers received an approximate total of 550,000 fingerlings over 5 years. With the extension of the project in 2007-2009 through strengthening of extension services on inland aquaculture development, under the 'Aquaculture in Northern Namibia' (ANN) Project umbrella, an extra 100 or more new farmers were identified. Results show that the extension services managed to assist in fish harvests for 114 SSFF's with 9560 kg of tilapia and 1556 kg of catfish harvested. The project's findings highlighted difficulties in accurately measuring fish production. Most fish farmers are located in a region where they only have enough water for fish culture during 5 months of the year. Also, many of the ponds they were using were incorrectly constructed and not suitable for fish farming. Farms in areas such as these, in hindsight, were unrealistic targets for aquaculture development, and it is the opinion of the author that it is important to re-direct effort and resources towards those able to farm with a good water supply for at least 10-12 months of the year. As of July 2010 the question remains unanswered; can fish farming in northwest Namibia be sustainable and economically viable with the current level of government extension, infrastructure and locally available resources? The author suggests that this will be possible in the next 5 years, once the government, together with the private sector and NGOs join to re-assess their current sets of objectives, which are, at present, too ambitious. Improvements could be made by implementing a better strategy, directing resources at a smaller number of sustainable, successful fish farmers rather than a larger number that include more inefficient farms. Large numbers of farms look good in policy documents, but spreading resources widely and inefficiently results in reduced net production and sustainability in the mid- to long-term.

scholarly journals Influence of public agricultural extension on technology adoption by small-scale farmers in Zimbabwe

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 25-42
Author(s):  
Masere ◽  
Worth
Keyword(s):  
Technology Adoption ◽  
Relevant Literature ◽  
Appropriate Technology ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Adoption Process ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Extension System ◽  
Service Training ◽  
Small Scale Farmers

This paper presents the findings of challenges facing Zimbabwe’s extension services and how these have affected the adoption of technologies they render to small-scale farmers. This study uses a critical review of relevant literature on Zimbabwe’s primary public extension agency (AGRITEX). Additionally, 21 key informant interviews (KIIs) were conducted to corroborate data collected in secondary research on extension approaches currently in use, the key factors affecting technology adoption, and the technology adoption process of small-scale farmers. The study found AGRITEX’s major challenges to be poor funding, poor remuneration and incentives for extension personnel, lack of in-service training, lack of appropriate technology, as well as poor operational resources like transport to reach all farmers. Consequently, services offered to small-scale farmers were compromised, which led to poor adoption of recommended technologies. Furthermore, the study determined that key factors influencing technology adoption are related to the farmers’ circumstances, the operating environment, and the attributes of technology itself. As a lasting solution to poor technology adoption, an adaptive extension system that promotes building the capacity of extension workers and researchers, as well as embracing farmers and their indigenous knowledge, is proposed.

Design and Operation of Small Wastewater Treatment Plants by the Microbial Film Process

1990 ◽  
Vol 22 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 139-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Iwai ◽  
Y. Oshino ◽  
T. Tsukada
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Wastewater Treatment Plants ◽  
Waste Water Treatment ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Small Communities ◽  
Fishing Villages ◽  
Sewer Systems ◽  
Water Treatment Plants ◽  
History Of ◽  
Microbial Film

Although the ratio of sewer systems to population in Japan has been improving in recent years, the construction of sewer systems in small communities such as farming or fishing villages, etc. had lagged behind that of urban areas. However, construction of small-scale sewer systems in farming and fishing villages has been actively carried out in recent years. This report explains the history of the promotion of small-scale sewer systems, why submerged filter beds are being employed in many cases, and introduces the design, operation and maintenance of representative waste-water treatment plants in farming and fishing villages which incorporate de-nitrogen and dephosphorization.

Planning Replicable Small Flow Wastewater Treatment Facilities in Developing Nations

1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (10) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Gaber ◽  
M. Antill ◽  
W. Kimball ◽  
R. Abdel Wahab
Keyword(s):  
Wastewater Treatment ◽  
Wastewater Treatment Plants ◽  
Local Development ◽  
Treatment Plant ◽  
Development Program ◽  
The United States ◽  
Appropriate Technology ◽  
Funding Agency ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Technology Choice

The implementation of urban village wastewater treatment plants in developing countries has historically been primarily a function of appropriate technology choice and deciding which of the many needy communities should receive the available funding and priority attention. Usually this process is driven by an outside funding agency who views the planning, design, and construction steps as relatively insignificant milestones in the overall effort required to quickly better a community's sanitary drainage problems. With the exception of very small scale type sanitation projects which have relatively simple replication steps, the development emphasis tends to be on the final treatment plant product with little or no attention specifically focused on community participation and institutionalizing national and local policies and procedures needed for future locally sponsored facilities replication. In contrast to this, the Government of Egypt (GOE) enacted a fresh approach through a Local Development Program with the United States AID program. An overview is presented of the guiding principals of the program which produced the first 24 working wastewater systems including gravity sewers, sewage pumping stations and wastewater treatment plants which were designed and constructed by local entities in Egypt. The wastewater projects cover five different treatment technologies implemented in both delta and desert regions.

Tools of Transformation: Appropriate Technology in U.S. Countercultural Literature

2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Peter Mortensen
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
Appropriate Technology ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Environmental Transformation ◽  
Buckminster Fuller ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Environmentally Sound ◽  
User Friendly ◽  
Second Wave

This essay takes its cue from second-wave ecocriticism and from recent scholarly interest in the “appropriate technology” movement that evolved during the 1960s and 1970s in California and elsewhere. “Appropriate technology” (or AT) refers to a loosely-knit group of writers, engineers and designers active in the years around 1970, and more generally to the counterculture’s promotion, development and application of technologies that were small-scale, low-cost, user-friendly, human-empowering and environmentally sound. Focusing on two roughly contemporary but now largely forgotten American texts Sidney Goldfarb’s lyric poem “Solar-Heated-Rhombic-Dodecahedron” (1969) and Gurney Norman’s novel Divine Right’s Trip (1971)—I consider how “hip” literary writers contributed to eco-technological discourse and argue for the 1960s counterculture’s relevance to present-day ecological concerns. Goldfarb’s and Norman’s texts interest me because they conceptualize iconic 1960s technologies—especially the Buckminster Fuller-inspired geodesic dome and the Volkswagen van—not as inherently alienating machines but as tools of profound individual, social and environmental transformation. Synthesizing antimodernist back-to-nature desires with modernist enthusiasm for (certain kinds of) machinery, these texts adumbrate a humanity- and modernity-centered post-wilderness model of environmentalism that resonates with the dilemmas that we face in our increasingly resource-impoverished, rapidly warming and densely populated world.

scholarly journals Canard optimization for enhancing the performance of small horizontal axis wind turbine at low wind speeds

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 63-71
Author(s):  
Yui-Chuin Shiah ◽  
Chia Hsiang Chang ◽  
Yu-Jen Chen ◽  
Ankam Vinod Kumar Reddy
Keyword(s):  
Wind Turbine ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Horizontal Axis ◽  
Power Coefficient ◽  
Peak Performance ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Horizontal Axis Wind Turbine ◽  
Wind Speeds ◽  
Optimum Parameters ◽  
Low Wind Speeds

ABSTRACT Generally, the environmental wind speeds in urban areas are relatively low due to clustered buildings. At low wind speeds, an aerodynamic stall occurs near the blade roots of a horizontal axis wind turbine (HAWT), leading to decay of the power coefficient. The research targets to design canards with optimal parameters for a small-scale HAWT system operated at variable rotational speeds. The design was to enhance the performance by delaying the aerodynamic stall near blade roots of the HAWT to be operated at low wind speeds. For the optimal design of canards, flow fields of the sample blades with and without canards were both simulated and compared with the experimental data. With the verification of our simulations, Taguchi analyses were performed to seek the optimum parameters of canards. This study revealed that the peak performance of the optimized canard system operated at 540 rpm might be improved by ∼35%.

scholarly journals Understanding Spatial Variability of NO2 in Urban Areas Using Spatial Modelling and Data Fusion Approaches

Atmosphere ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 179
Author(s):  
Said Munir ◽  
Martin Mayfield ◽  
Daniel Coca
Keyword(s):  
Data Fusion ◽  
Spatial Variability ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Road Traffic ◽  
Dispersion Model ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Spatial Modelling ◽  
City Centre ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
The City

Small-scale spatial variability in NO2 concentrations is analysed with the help of pollution maps. Maps of NO2 estimated by the Airviro dispersion model and land use regression (LUR) model are fused with measured NO2 concentrations from low-cost sensors (LCS), reference sensors and diffusion tubes. In this study, geostatistical universal kriging was employed for fusing (integrating) model estimations with measured NO2 concentrations. The results showed that the data fusion approach was capable of estimating realistic NO2 concentration maps that inherited spatial patterns of the pollutant from the model estimations and adjusted the modelled values using the measured concentrations. Maps produced by the fusion of NO2-LCS with NO2-LUR produced better results, with r-value 0.96 and RMSE 9.09. Data fusion adds value to both measured and estimated concentrations: the measured data are improved by predicting spatiotemporal gaps, whereas the modelled data are improved by constraining them with observed data. Hotspots of NO2 were shown in the city centre, eastern parts of the city towards the motorway (M1) and on some major roads. Air quality standards were exceeded at several locations in Sheffield, where annual mean NO2 levels were higher than 40 µg/m3. Road traffic was considered to be the dominant emission source of NO2 in Sheffield.

Local Communities as a Tool for the Development of Municipal Democracy: German Experience and Lessons for Russia

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (5) ◽  
pp. 74-88
Author(s):  
Aleksandr Larichev ◽  
Emil Markwart
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
The State ◽  
Household Waste ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Issue Management ◽  
State Management ◽  
Municipal Level

Local government as a political, legal and social institution finds itself in a very difficult period of development in Russia. The long-established tendency of its subordination to the state has intensified today in connection with the newly adopted constitutional amendments. At the same time, it seems obvious that further “embedding” of local government into the state management vertical, in the absence of any positive effect in terms of solving socio-economic and infrastructural problems, will inevitably lead to other hard to reverse, negative results both for local government institutions and the system of public authority as a whole. The normal functioning of local government requires, however, not only the presence of its sufficient institutional and functional autonomy from the state, but also an adequate territorial and social base for its implementation. To ensure the formation of viable territorial collectives, especially in urban areas, it seems appropriate to promote the development of self-government based on local groups at the intra-municipal level. Such local groups can independently manage issues of local importance on a small scale (landscaping, social volunteering, and neighborly mutual assistance), and provide, within the boundaries of a local territory, due civil control over the maintenance by municipal authorities of more complex and large-scale local issues (repair and development of infrastructure, removal of solid household waste and more). At the same time, the development of local communities can by no means be a self-sufficient and substitutional mechanism, whose introduction would end the need for democracy in the full scope of municipal structures overall. In this regard, the experience of local communities’ development in Germany, a state with legal traditions similar to Russian ones, with a centuries-old history of the development of territorial communities and a difficult path to building democracy and forming civil society, seems to be very interesting. Here, the progressive development of local forms of democracy and the participation of residents in local issue management are combined with stable mechanisms of municipal government, and the interaction of municipalities with the state does not torpedo the existing citizen forms of self-government. At the same time, the experience of Germany shows that the decentralization of public issue management which involves the local population can only be effective in a situation where, in addition to maintaining a full-fledged self-government mechanism at the general municipal level, relevant local communities are endowed with real competence and resources to influence local issue decision-making. The role of formalized local communities in urban areas, as the German experience shows, can not only facilitate the decentralization of solving public problems, but can also help in timely elimination of triggers for mobilizing citywide supercollectives with negative agendas. This experience seems useful and applicable in the Russian context.

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