The South San Joaquin Irrigation District (SSJID) board commissioned Stantec Consulting as a partner in developing an irrigation program that could improve delivery efficiency and service. A portion of one of the District's nine divisions ‐ 1,537 ha in Division 9 ‐ was chosen as the site for building, testing, and optimizing a pilot pressure irrigation project. The vision for the system included the following fundamental capabilities: pressurization. Pumping water from a 69,075 m3 pond to individual farms through 14.5 km of pressurized pipeline; calculated use.

Worldwide, fruit-tree-based agroforestry systems have been only modestly studied, although they are common on smallholder farms. Such systems based on apple (Malus spp.), peach (Prunus spp.), and pear (Pyrus spp.) are common in northwest Guatemala as low intensity homegardens and are known to increase total farm productivity in communities where farm size is a limiting factor.

Following the national policy, the Department of Agriculture of Thailand has implemented a crop diversification program in several provinces of the country. This study, which was conducted in Nakhon Pathom Province, analyzed the extent of crop diversification and its determinants using primary information collected from 245 farm households using a structured questionnaire, and from selected farmer leaders and agricultural development officials. The study also assessed the effects of crop diversification on income and the inputs used.

This paper describes a partnership between Lipton tea and the Kenya Tea Development Agency (KTDA). The partnership aims to encourage smallholders to produce tea more sustainably and profitably. A Farmer Field School (FFS) approach was used. This has resulted in the development of high levels of social capital, and the programme has resulted in increased annual yields and a renewed focus on improved water and land management. Farmers who have graduated from FFSs have acted as extension agents themselves.

Anthelmintic resistance which is escalating in Malaysia and othercountries is forcing farmers worldwide to look at alternative, green technologies to improve productivity and reduce diseases caused by helminths in livestock. One such method is the use of effective microbes or Useful Microbes (UM) for worm control. Therefore, a preliminary study was conducted to evaluate the anthelmintic effect of UM on nematode parasites of goat in a government farm.

Agriculture is the mainstay of rural populations, especially in the developing world. Increasing population and the demand for food, fodder and fuelwood have threatened the sustainability of the land resources. Without understanding farmers' perceptions on land-related issues, sustainable management of land resources is impossible because they have intimate knowledge of their land. Besides technical solutions to land-related problems, socio-economic appraisal also plays an important role for solutions to these problems.

Apart from the difficulty to attract new members, leakage of sales outside the cooperative is a major challenge for the coffee cooperatives in Rwanda. Local (independent) traders still constitute a major market for coffee producers. Yet, cooperatives also accept the produce from non-members and pay them the same price. Our objective in this paper is to analyse the importance of this phenomenon of double side-selling. We collected data from a sample of 170 coffee farmers. We use a probit model to analyse characteristics linked to cooperative membership and to study double side-selling.

Vegetable farming systems (VFSs) in Indonesia have a long tradition in the upland areas and were characterised by high productivity and competitiveness. However, in the last decade, the profitability of VFSs has been challenged by several issues including lower productivity, higher domestic prices, various export barriers, an increase in the volume of imported vegetables and environmental deterioration.

Karst rocky desertification (KRD) is a type of land degradation especially prominent in southwest China. This article analyzes the anthropogenic driving forces of KRD at two scales: rural locality and its macro socio‐economic circumstances. At the rural locality scale, the intensive human pressure on land because of a large and fast growing population and unsustainable land use are identified to be the reason for KRD. However, more radical driving forces lie in the farmers' disadvantages in social‐economic circumstances, which compel them to overuse rural land.

The Socio Bosque program is a national conservation agreement scheme of the government of Ecuador. Socio Bosque consists of the transfer of a direct monetary incentive per hectare of native forest and other native ecosystems to individual landowners and local and indigenous communities who protect these ecosystems, through voluntary conservation agreements that are monitored on a regular basis for compliance. Two years after its creation, the program now includes more than half a million hectares of natural ecosystems and has over 60,000 beneficiaries.

This study used linear programming (LP) to analyse land-use alternatives in the traditional Umbundu farming system in the Angolan central highlands. Farmers of the region have traditionally produced maize and pulses for subsistence and vegetables and timber as cash crops. Different pasture and forest fallow rotations are used along catena production sites. The system is labour-intensive and uses animal traction. LP problems were formulated and solved for a baseline land-use alternative, improved diet alternative and maximal timber production alternative.