No abstract

In most of sub-Saharan-Africa (SSA), agriculture land-use supports the livelihoods of the majority of people. Land use for agricultural-activity is an economic activity that is highly dependent upon weather and climate that produce food and fiber necessary to sustain human life. Hence, land-use for agriculture is expected to be vulnerable to climate variability and change. This paper deduced that Trans-logarithmic coefficients results of short-run sustainability-index (SRSI), land policy-intervention variables and household-sizes are dominance factors. Also, SRSI showed 0.69, suggesting that 69% of the farmers made unsustainable use of agricultural-land. Marginal Value Product (MVP) model was used as adaptation factors determinants and was tested for its appropriateness which gave a robust estimations. The estimated correlation coefficients among the various adaptation options are significant for 10 out of 19 combinations. Access to information on climate-change from extension or other public sources, farmer-to-farmer extension and knowledge on agro-ecology strengthen the likelihood of climate-change perception and adaptation. The study indicated a strong relationship between efficient use of agricultural land and adaptive processes to climate change. Hence, policies of promoting and motivating sustainable land-use management need to be entrenched, in addition to providing efficient climatic data intervention that will improve on adaptive processes of farmers.

Aqueous shoot and root extracts of Arctotis arctotoides were tested for their allelopathic properties on cabbage, carrot, tomato and spinach seed germination and seedling growth. The addition of the two extracts at 8 and 10 mg ml-1 resulted in the highest germination inhibitions. The shoot extract at 10 mg ml-1 inhibited cabbage, carrot, tomato and spinach seed germination by 79.1, 75.6, 82.0 and 46.0%, respectively while the root extracts at the same concentration had inhibitions of 66.0, 64.0, 64.7 and 42.1%, respectively on each of the vegetables. The decreases in the radicle growth of the four targets were highest in 10 mg ml-1 of the shoot extract with cabbage, carrot, tomato and spinach having 95.3, 98.9, 92.9 and 87.6%, respectively. Considerable reductions also occurred in the plumule length of all the seedlings. The present study has demonstrated the inhibitory properties of the shoot and root aqueous extracts of A. arctotoides on the germination and seedling growth of the four vegetables.