This brief explores the potentials and gains to be made by applying a gender perspective in agronomic research and extension work. While many people would readily acknowledge the importance of gender in any kind of agronomic research, the methods and techniques for applying the perspective are not as obvious nor easy to implement. What follows is a helpful Q&A by the interdisciplinary team who work on gender and pest and disease management in the CGIAR Research Program on Roots, Tubers and Bananas ...

Soybean production in sub-Saharan Africa is increasing as farmers open more land areas for cultivation and replace other crops, such as tobacco, in favor of this legume crop. Despite the production is increased in Mozambique, demand for animal feed and oil is not satisfied. As such, farmers explore ways to improve yield per unit area of soybean by using bio-inoculants from various sources and agroecological adaptability. These bio-inoculants are seldom available during planting time, and retail ...

Gender-responsive breeding is a new approach to making sure modern breeding takes advantage of opportunities to improve gender equality in agriculture. Conventional research on the acceptability of modern varieties has scarcely addressed gender differences during adoption studies. Gender-responsive breeding starts from a different premise that adoption and social impact will be enhanced if gender is addressed at early stages of variety design and priority setting in breeding. However, until recently, ...

Intensified human activities can augment soil organic carbon (SOC) losses from the world’s croplands, making SOC a highly dynamic parameter both in space and time. Sentinel-2 spectral imagery is well placed to capture the spatiotemporal variability of SOC, but its capability has only been demonstrated for agricultural regions mostly located in Europe. Furthermore, most studies so far only used single-date images that resulted in spatially non-continuous SOC maps, hampering their ability to aid ...

Diversification is a common livelihood strategy for rural households in developing countries, with diversification being either a choice or necessity depending on individual household contexts. Using two waves of data (from 2009 and 2011) for 1773 households from eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa, we examined livelihood diversification and its drivers. We examined livelihood diversification by considering household involvement in three livelihood activities: crop, livestock, and non-farm. ...

Client-responsiveness is a foundation for effectiveness of public sector breeding programs in agriculture, aquaculture and livestock. However, there remains a considerable lack of clarity about what this means, specifically in terms of how programs can be gender-responsive. This study contributes to addressing that need. It does so through sharing higher-level insights emerging from the combined experiences of eight gendered trait preference cases from across nine countries in Asia and Africa. The ...

Seed enterprise is an initiative and risk set up in the production of cassava stems from existing local seed varieties or improved seed varieties for economically sustainable profit. Although, most cassava seeds produced are through informal seed system among smallholder farmers but there is need for replacement strategy for cassava seeds mostly planted over years. Based on this, there is need for intense exploration in the linkage between cassava seed management and diffusion scheme among rural ...

Tomato is perishable and its high moisture content makes it susceptible for various postharvest losses. Tomato quality changes continuously after harvesting when fruits start losing quality because of environmental stress and pathogen infection. Thus, the objective of this research was to propose simple postharvest technology using rosemary essential oil (REO) to reduce postharvest decay. This was done by conducting a field survey in order to determine agricultural potential of soil and environmental ...