This brochure is a guide to the cultivation of pearl millet, covering crucial aspects such as ideal climatic conditions, land preparation, optimal fertilizer and manure application, weed management, proper harvesting and post-harvest handling. It further delves into the nuances of pest and disease management, specifically addressing concerns like head mold from various fungi, stem borers, African ballworm and challenges posed by birds and Striga weeds.

This brochure is a guide to cultivating pigeonpea, covering essential aspects such as land preparation, seed rate, sowing, weed control, optimal fertilizer application and harvesting. It provides insights into managing insect pests like pod borers, pod fly, pod-sucking bugs, blister beetles and bruchids. Additionally, it addresses the control of fungal diseases like Fusarium wilt, emphasizing practices such as intercropping and crop rotation for disease prevention.

Soil salinization is a significant form of land degradation in agricultural areas. Remote sensing is a better way to assess soil salinity than traditional methods, as it provides non-destructive and repetitive informative assessment for monitoring and mapping soil salinity. Different sensors can identify soil salinity in remote sensing data through direct and indirect indicators. A Brief review of the major soil salinity mapping studies is presented here.

Inadequate and poor-quality feed resources constrain livestock production that compromises the livelihoods dependent on livestock in low- and middle-income countries. Several forage varieties have been developed, targeting smallholder farmers in developing countries, yet the level of adoption remains low, particularly among women farmers. Adoption of varieties could enhance livelihoods by increasing livestock productivity and by providing income from the sale of surplus forage. Evidence on gendered barriers to, and incentives for, adoption of forage varieties is scarce.

Research on gender inequality in seed systems has underscored the need to build more inclusive interventions. For gender-transformative (GT) interventions in seed systems to succeed, there is urgent need to test new models which should be guided by empirical evidence. We present findings from research that unraveled the underlying causes that prevent women and youth from actively participating and benefiting as cassava seed entrepreneurs (CSEs). This study underpins the designing and testing of GT interventions as part of the Muhogo Bora cassava seed systems project in Tanzania.

Women play an important role in agriculture and account for around 50% of the agricultural labor force in Asia. Strong evidence exists to prove that women farmers have less access to land, inputs, labor and information compared to men, which, in turn, can influence technical efficiency in farms, that is the effectiveness with which a given set of inputs is used to produce output. Strong reasons indicate that women’s empowerment may contribute to enhancing technical efficiency, most notably through improvements in women’s access to human, physical, and social capital.

Enhancing the productivity of crops through the adoption and uptake of technologies improves farmers' socio-economic status through increased market participation. However, smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) face a myriad of challenges that make it difficult for them to access and participate in the output markets. Like most SSA countries, the uptake of improved technologies is still low in Malawi. This paper examines the relationship between uptake of improved potato seed and donor-funded training on market participation.

Two important risks faced by many smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa are erratic weather patterns and insecure land tenure. It is likely these risks will increasingly interact as projections of more erratic weather make small-scale farming more difficult and demand for rural land grows. This paper asks how farmers in Western Tanzania view these compound risks and the influence this has on levels of investment in adaptive agricultural technologies and the demand for land certification in a lab-in-the-field setting.

Tropical peatlands are one of the largest natural sources of atmospheric methane (CH4) and play a significant role in regional and global carbon budgets. However, large uncertainties persist regarding their feedbacks to climate variations. The Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) Land Model (ELM) is an ongoing state-of-the-science model, which has developed new representations of soil hydrology and biogeochemistry and includes a new microbial-functional-group-based CH4 module.

International standards and policies are clear about women’s right to equality in the enjoyment of all their rights, including rights to access, use, inherit, control and own land. Sustainable Development Goal Target 5.a specifically calls for reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources, as well as access to, ownership and control over land and natural resources. Securing women’s land and resource rights is a critical goal in and of itself - and also a crucial factor in achieving many of the other SDGs.

Banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW) is a major threat to banana production in Rwanda, causing up to 100% yield loss. There are no biological or chemical control measures, and little is known about the potential direction and magnitude of its spread; hence, cultural control efforts are reactive rather than proactive. In this study, we assessed BXW risk under current and projected climates to guide early warning and control by applying the maximum entropy (Maxent) model on 1,022 georeferenced BXW datapoints and 20 environmental variables.