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"Agricultural technology"
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Handbook on agriculture biotechnology and development
This title provides a diverse, but concentrated, global perspective on biotechnology applications to plant agriculture. Readers gain rich insights into specific aspects of agbiotech, anchored in an overarching governance framework that determines trade and regulation of agbiotech processes.
Book
Agricultural Extension and Technology Adoption for Food Security
We evaluate causal impacts of a large-scale agricultural extension program for smallholder women farmers on technology adoption and food security in Uganda through a regression discontinuity design that exploits an arbitrary distance-to-branch threshold for village program eligibility. We find eligible farmers used better basic cultivation methods, achieved improved food security. Given minimal changes in adoption of relatively expensive inputs, we attribute these gains to improved cultivation methods that require low upfront monetary investment. Farmers also modified their shock-coping methods. These results highlight the role of information and training in boosting agricultural productivity among poor farmers and, indirectly, improving food security.
Journal Article
Small Dams : Planning, Construction, and Maintenance
\"A practial guide to determining catchment yield and the amount of water required in a dam. Also advises on working with engineers and contractors, and outlines the causes of dam failures and how to remedy problems quickly. It further covers relevant legislation, as well as environmental and ecological issues from a global perspective, with explicit reference to various countries around the world. An invaluable reference resource for anyone who owns or plans to own a dam, and a useful reference for agencies, contractors and engineers\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Agricultural Productivity and Structural Transformation: Evidence from Brazil
We study the effects of the adoption of new agricultural technologies on structural transformation. To guide empirical work, we present a simple model where the effect of agricultural productivity on industrial development depends on the factor-bias of technical change. We test the predictions of the model by studying the introduction of genetically engineered soybean seeds in Brazil, which had heterogeneous effects on agricultural productivity across areas with different soil and weather characteristics. We find that technical change in soy production was strongly labor-saving and led to industrial growth, as predicted by the model.
Journal Article
Machine landscapes : architectures of the post-anthropocene
The most significant architectural spaces in the world are now entirely empty of people. The data centres, telecommunications networks, distribution warehouses, unmanned ports and industrialised agriculture that define the very nature of who we are today are at the same time places we can never visit. Instead they are occupied by server stacks and hard drives, logistics bots and mobile shelving units, autonomous cranes and container ships, robot vacuum cleaners and internet-connected toasters, driverless tractors and taxis. This issue is an atlas of sites, architectures and infrastructures that are not built for us, but whose form, materiality and purpose is configured to anticipate the patterns of machine vision and habitation rather than our own. We are said to be living in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans are the dominant force shaping the planet. This collection of spaces, however, more accurately constitutes an era of the Post-Anthropocene, a period where it is technology and artificial intelligence that now computes, conditions and constructs our world. Marking the end of human-centered design, the issue turns its attention to the new typologies of the post-human, architecture without people and our endless expanse of machine landscapes.
Book
Social Learning and Incentives for Experimentation and Communication
Low adoption of agricultural technologies holds large productivity consequences for developing countries. Many countries hire agricultural extension agents to communicate with farmers about new technologies, even though a large academic literature has established that information from social networks is a key determinant of product adoption. We incorporate social learning in extension policy using a large-scale field experiment in which we communicate to farmers using different members of social networks. We show that communicator own adoption and effort are susceptible to small performance incentives, and the social identity of the communicator influences others’ learning and adoption. Farmers appear most convinced by communicators who share a group identity with them, or who face comparable agricultural conditions. Exploring the incentives for injection points in social networks to experiment with and communicate about new technologies can take the influential social learning literature in a more policy-relevant direction.
Journal Article
Changes in Agricultural Extension and Implications for Farmer Adoption of New Practices
Agricultural extension programs have changed significantly over the past four decades. What has changed and why? Have these changes affected adoption of innovations by farmers? What if anything should policy makers and extension agencies do differently, particularly in developing countries? Structural changes in agriculture, new types of agricultural technologies, tight public budgets, efforts to decentralize government, and emerging information and communication technologies (ICT) have led to pluralistic and, in some cases, lower-cost extension and advisory services that combine public and private mechanisms for financing and implementing extension activities. Farmer groups and virtual networks play a growing role in technology diffusion, and extension services can exploit these networks using the latest ICT approaches.
Journal Article
Technological Innovations, Downside Risk, and the Modernization of Agriculture
We use a randomized experiment in India to show that improved technology enhances agricultural productivity by crowding in modern inputs and cultivation practices. Specifically, we show that a new rice variety that reduces downside risk by providing flood tolerance has positive effects on adoption of a more labor-intensive planting method, area cultivated, fertilizer usage, and credit utilization. We find that a large share of the expected gains from the technology comes from crowding in of other investments. Therefore, improved technologies that reduce risk by protecting production in bad years have the potential to increase agricultural productivity in normal years.
Journal Article
Uncertainty, Learning, and Technology Adoption in Agriculture
Adoption of agricultural innovations has been an important factor affecting the welfare of farmers, the productivity of agriculture and the economics of the food sector. This paper reviews the literature on technology adoption in agriculture with a focus on the role of uncertainty and learning. It examines the factors affecting adoption benefits for farmers and their linkages with the innovation process. It also discusses the welfare implications of innovation and adoption for farmers and consumers.
Journal Article
Learning about a New Technology: Pineapple in Ghana
This paper investigates the role of social learning in the diffusion of a new
agricultural technology in Ghana. We use unique data on farmers' communication
patterns to define each individual's information neighborhood. Conditional on many
potentially confounding variables, we find evidence that farmers adjust their inputs
to align with those of their information neighbors who were surprisingly successful in
previous periods. The relationship of these input adjustments to experience further
indicates the presence of social learning. In addition, applying the same method to
input choices for another crop, of known technology, correctly indicates an absence of
social learning effects.
Journal Article