Improving smallholder farmers’ gross margins and labor-use efficiency across a range of cropping systems in the Eastern Gangetic Plains

Application of innovation platforms to catalyse adoption of conservation agriculture practices in South Asia

“…This paper builds on other work in the EGP through the SRFSI project (Brown et al, 2020;Gathala et al, 2020a;Gathala et al, 2020b;Gathala et al, 2021;Islam et al, 2019;Sinha et al, 2019). Districts were originally selected because they are considered as typical marginal areas with a range of constraints (Islam et al, 2019), but they were also matched in pairs across country borders to enable comparison of similar physical conditions (soil type, rainfall, ground water resources), but with different socioeconomics and institutional settings (e.g., comparison of Rangpur, Northwest Bangladesh with Coochbehar, West Bengal, India) (Figure 1).…”

“…Standardized fertilizer and herbicide recommendations were provided to farmers. The economics of these practices was also examined (see Brown et al, 2020 andGathala et al, 2021 for details) to determine the benefits of CASI on labour resources, production costs and gross margins. CASI therefore involved a series of interlinked activities (technologies) and knowledge that the trial farmers needed to understand and adopt.…”

“…Conservation agriculture-based sustainable Intensification (CASI) has been proposed as package of practices that could be used to improve the sustainability of smallholder farm productivity and profitability (Gathala et al, 2013;Gathala et al, 2021;Islam et al, 2019;Jat et al, 2021;Keil et al, 2015). However, existing extension systems are not set up to support widespread adoption by using the innovation structures to have the impact necessary to solve food security and livelihood demands.…”

“…The Eastern Gangetic Plains (EGP) of Bangladesh, India and Nepal, is home to over 300 million people, with the world's highest concentration of rural poverty and a strong dependence on agriculture for food security and livelihoods (Ericksen et al, 2011). The EGP has the potential to become a major contributor to South Asian regional food security, but rice and wheat productivity remain low and diversification is limited because of poorly developed markets, sparse agricultural knowledge and service networks, and inadequate development of available water resources and sustainable production practices (Gathala et al, 2021;Islam et al, 2019;Sugden et al, 2014). Most smallholder farmers have small areas of land (<1 ha) and labour shortages are becoming more acute as feminization of agriculture increases (Darbas et al, 2020), but this has not occurred equally across the region (Sen et al, 2019).…”

Evaluating the Impacts of Smallholder Farmer’s Participation in Modern Agricultural Value Chain Tactics for Facilitating Poverty Alleviation—A Case Study of Kiwifruit Industry in Shaanxi, China

“…These profound sectors are currently facing some threatening situations like ever-increasing populations, climate change, and continuous degradation of natural resources. Those challenges become a greater burden for the rural farmers, particularly smallholder farmers [5,6] holding land plots smaller than 2 hectares [7,8]. The smallholder farmers rely primarily on family workers, which is why small-scale farms could be one of the best drivers for fostering food security, mall nutrition, and poverty elevation [9,10].…”