Digital Agriculture Strategy

The aim of this chapter is to examine strategies for digitalizing agriculture. The first part of the chapter examines strategies for digitalizing agriculture in Africa. This part begins with an analysis of the role of agriculture in Africa, and it attempts to answer the question of whether African can feed itself and the world through its own agriculture. The first part will also consider strategies for innovating and computerizing Africa's agriculture. The second part of the chapter will examine agricultural trends and strategies in the European Union. This part will focus specifically on the trends of digital-oriented and smart farm developments. The final part of the chapter will consider strategies for digitalizing agriculture in Latin America and Asia.

Microbial Derived Compounds, a Step Toward Enhancing Microbial Inoculants Technology for Sustainable Agriculture

Sustainable agriculture remains a focus for many researchers, in an effort to minimize environmental degradation and climate change. The use of plant growth promoting microorganisms (PGPM) is a hopeful approach for enhancing plant growth and yield. However, the technology faces a number of challenges, especially inconsistencies in the field. The discovery, that microbial derived compounds can independently enhance plant growth, could be a step toward minimizing shortfalls related to PGPM technology. This has led many researchers to engage in research activities involving such compounds. So far, the findings are promising as compounds have been reported to enhance plant growth under stressed and non-stressed conditions in a wide range of plant species. This review compiles current knowledge on microbial derived compounds, taking a reader through a summarized protocol of their isolation and identification, their relevance in present agricultural trends, current use and limitations, with a view to giving the reader a picture of where the technology has come from, and an insight into where it could head, with some suggestions regarding the probable best ways forward.

Smart and Climate-Smart Agricultural Trends as Core Aspects of Smart Village Functions

Attention has shifted to the development of villages in Europe and other parts of the world with the goal of combating rural–urban migration, and moving toward self-sufficiency in rural areas. This situation has birthed the smart village idea. Smart village initiatives such as those of the European Union is motivating global efforts aimed at improving the live and livelihood of rural dwellers. These initiatives are focused on improving agricultural productivity, among other things, since most of the food we eat are grown in rural areas around the world. Nevertheless, a major challenge faced by proponents of the smart village concept is how to provide a framework for the development of the term, so that this development is tailored towards sustainability. The current work examines the level of progress of climate smart agriculture, and tries to borrow from its ideals, to develop a framework for smart village development. Given the advances in technology, agricultural development that encompasses reduction of farming losses, optimization of agricultural processes for increased yield, as well as prevention, monitoring, and early detection of plant and animal diseases, has now embraced varieties of smart sensor technologies. The implication is that the studies and results generated around the concept of climate smart agriculture can be adopted in planning of villages, and transforming them into smart villages. Hence, we argue that for effective development of the smart village framework, smart agricultural techniques must be prioritized, viz-a-viz other developmental practicalities.

The Yeoman Myth: A Troubling Foundation of the Beginning Farmer Movement

Aging farmer demographics and declining agricultural trends provoke policy makers, farmer advocacy groups, and food system scholars to ask, “Who will do the work of farming in the future?” One response to this concern has been the rise of a “beginning farmer” narrative, where the goal of creating new farmers emerges as a key aspirational food systems reform mechanism. In this vision, young and beginning farmers will seize the transitioning lands from retiring farmers and bring with them an alternative system that is ecologically minded, open to new innovations, and socially oriented. Given the flurry of governmental, nonprofit, and private sector activity spurred by this vision, this article asks, what are the ideological drivers of the beginning farmer construct, and what are the consequences for the goals associated with a just food system transition? Invoking the concept of mythology, this article examines the character of the American beginning farmer narrative. The narrative is shown to appeal to a particular land use vision, one based on ideals of individual land ownership, single proprietor farming, neoliberal logics of change, and whiteness. In a sense, the beginning farmer movement embraces a yeoman mythology, a powerful force underwriting the American dream. The consequence of this embrace has problematic outcomes for the transformative potential of a politically engaged beginning farmer constituency. Embracing alternative imaginaries and mythologies may be a first step in forging a new farmer movement that provides equity across socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Agriculture and the Environment

This comprehensive collection of 71 peer-reviewed articles presents an authoritative overview of the role and impacts of agriculture on the natural and human environments, from its origins historically to current praxis and outlooks. It examines the major themes of global and regional environmental change, the evolution of agriculture, historical styles of agriculture, famine, agricultural pollutants, research needs in agriculture, and the future of agriculture. Curated by an international panel of scholars, the collection includes expert perspectives on specific important crops, soil science, land abuse and stewardship, methods of irrigation, experimental agricultures, patterns of farming, history and agro-archaeology, current agricultural trends, and contemporary public policy.

Impacts of Spatial Patterns of Rural and Exurban Residential Development on Agricultural Trends in the Intermountain West

In recent years, counties in the Intermountain West (Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah) have experienced rapid population growth and housing development, and much of this growth is occurring outside of urban areas. Residential development often has negative impacts on farmlands, farm viability, and environmental services provided by working landscapes. We used county-level data to identify the association between the intensity and spatial patterns of residential settlement and trends in selected farm outcomes between 1997 and 2012 in the region. Results demonstrate that accounting for the spatial pattern or degree of fragmentation and clustering of rural and exurban residential development improves our ability to explain variation in county-level agricultural trends. We also found evidence of significant spatial dependencies among the counties in this region, which suggests that trends in one county are affected by development and agricultural activity in neighboring counties. Findings suggest that efforts to protect farming using growth management tools can work, but should focus on separation of agriculture and potentially conflicting land uses.

MALTHUS, STATISTICS, AND THE STATE OF INDIAN AGRICULTURE

ABSTRACTReferences to Malthus are increasingly evident in narratives of agricultural trends in development discourse at the end of the twentieth century. This article addresses the long roots of Malthusian thinking in formulating public policy, that can be traced across from Malthus's own ideas and to subsequent construction of neo-Malthusianisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It deploys the distinction between two approaches to statistical data collection that emerge in Malthus's own time: an ‘open’ system that collects data to identify trends, and a ‘closed’ system that uses data to prove an existing model. The article uses these distinctions in order to demonstrate opposing tendencies in policy-making in both England and India, with particular reference to Indian agriculture. It shows how radical thinking about data collection as an inductive line of enquiry lost out to a deductive approach that regarded data on Indian agriculture as doomed, because of its ‘unimproved’ condition, and highlights three moments where opposing tendencies were important. The article concludes that this turn in thinking about food, land, and people continues to persist in agricultural policy-making in international development circles into the present.

Current and future land use and land cover scenarios in the Arroio Marrecas watershed

ABSTRACT This study evaluated historic land use and land cover changes in the Arroio Marrecas watershed (Caxias do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul state of Brazil) and simulated future land use scenarios until 2034. Spatial and temporal simulations were conducted with the Conversion of Land Use and its Effects - Small Regional Extent (CLUE-S) model. Three land use scenarios were developed to include public policies and agricultural trends in the study region for 20 years (2015-2034). Geospatial analysis of different land uses showed that areas that were originally covered grasslands and forests decreased, which can be attributed to the expansion of intensive agricultural uses, such as fruit farming/forestry and urbanization. The reallocation dynamics of land use with CLUE-S was primarily driven by the soil class (especially Typic and Humic Dystrudepts and Lithic Undorthents), with limited effects of altitude and slope. Analysis of the land use maps of the Arroio Marrecas watershed until 2015 identified major human-induced changes that were driven by expanding agricultural production and urbanization. The allocation of land use derived from the proposed future scenarios with CLUE-S showed that in this regional context, Humic Dystrudepts and Rhodic Kanhapludults were the key drivers of the allocation of agricultural expansion. Conversely, natural resource conservation was indicated to most likely occur in Typic Dystrudepts. The main limitation of this approach is the recognition of driving factors that have a high correlation with each land use as effective predictor variables.

Modelling Farm Growth and Its Impact on Agricultural Land Use: A Country Scale Application of an Agent-Based Model

The ongoing economic pressure on farmers has resulted in lower gross margins, lower income, and a continuous decrease in the number of farmers in large parts of the world. Most remaining farmers upscale their activities by taking over the land of their former competitors, resulting in a decrease in agricultural employment and an increase in average farm size, accompanied by specialisation and new management techniques. Understanding these significant trends and their impact on the land use and environment requires a deeper knowledge of the mechanisms involved and the impacts of different policy measures. These processes are ideally represented through agent-based modelling. Currently, agent-based models are rarely for larger regions. This paper presents ADAM (Agricultural Dynamics through Agent-based Modelling), using it for the case study of Belgium. ADAM was created to obtain insights in past and current agricultural trends and to explore possible effects of policy measures. ADAM simulates the evolution of a farmer population and their farms at a fine scale on the country level. It produces yearly outputs on the number of farms, their size, and the type of farming activity on every parcel. Results show that ADAM is capable of adequately modelling a farmer population according to past trends and that it can be used to explore the results of a business-as-usual scenario, therefore showing the possibility of creating agent-based models for larger scale real-world applications.