Jens A Andersson

Wageningen University & Research | WUR · Plant Production Systems Group

On-farm demonstration-trials are a common strategy to introduce new technologies to farmers, while simultaneously evaluating these technologies’ performance under farmer conditions. The current study focuses on conservation agriculture (CA) technology adoption dynamics among a small group of farmers who can be considered increasingly knowledgeable,...

The advent of microcredit programmes in sub-Saharan Africa provides opportunities for rural households to acquire agricultural inputs and consumer goods. This study analysed gender differences in investment behaviour and repayment performance using a unique dataset-the complete client database (21,386 clients) of a microcredit programme operating i...

While many have extolled the potential impacts of digital advisory services for smallholder agriculture, the evidence for sustained uptake of such tools remains limited. This paper utilizes a survey of tool developers and researchers, as well as a systematic meta-analysis of prior studies, to assess the extent and challenges of scaling decision sup...

With many of the world’s poor engaged in agriculture, agricultural development programmes often aim to improve livelihoods through improved farming practices. Research on the impacts of agricultural technology interventions is dominated by comparisons of adopters and non-adopters. By contrast, in this literature study, we critically review how tech...

Intensified livestock production is considered as a promising pathway for smallholder farmers. Nevertheless, this pathway may entail prohibitive investment requirements of labour, capital or trade-offs at farm level that preclude sustainable intensification. We used fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) to assess farmers' perceptions of changes in the farm...

Most food in sub-Saharan Africa is produced on small farms. Using large datasets from household surveys conducted across many countries, we find that the majority of farms are less than 1 ha, much smaller than previous estimates. Farms are larger in farming systems in drier climates. Through a detailed analysis of food self-sufficiency, food and nu...

Achieving SDG2 (zero hunger) in a situation of rapid global population growth requires a continued focus on food production. Farming not merely needs to sustainably produce nutritious diets, but should also provide livelihoods for farmers, while retaining natural ecosystems and services. Rather than focusing on production principles, this article e...

Agriculture is in crisis. Soil health is collapsing. Biodiversity faces the sixth mass extinction. Crop yields are plateauing. Against this crisis narrative swells a clarion call for Regenerative Agriculture. But what is Regenerative Agriculture, and why is it gaining such prominence? Which problems does it solve, and how? Here we address these que...

Conservation Agriculture (CA) has been widely promoted as a pathway to sustainably intensify agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Yet despite decades of promotion, CA uptake in SSA remains sparse with only few analyses of its impacts on farming and rural livelihoods. This study, which focuses on areas in Central Malawi considered to have a rela...

Agronomists have increasingly conducted experiments on-farm, in an attempt to increase the wider applicability (external validity) of their experimental findings and their relevance for agricultural development. This review assesses the way in which on-farm experimental studies address the scope or generalisability of their findings when based on a...

Herbicide use is increasing in sub-Saharan Africa. While herbicides promise improved weed-control, labour savings and even reduced land degradation – they are promoted to enable Conservation Agriculture (CA) adoption – there are concerns about their health and environmental risks. Yet, their socio-economic implications have been largely ignored. We...

In sub-Saharan Africa, there is considerable spatial and temporal variability in relations between nutrient application and crop yield, due to varying inherent soil nutrients supply, soil moisture, crop management and germplasm. This variability affects fertilizer use efficiency and crop productivity. Therefore, development of decision systems that...

The concept of technology adoption (along with its companions, diffusion and scaling) is commonly used to design development interventions, to frame impact evaluations and to inform decision-making about new investments in development-oriented agricultural research. However, adoption simplifies and mischaracterises what happens during processes of...

Intended to test broad hypotheses and arrive at unifying conclusions, meta-analysis is the process of extracting, assembling, and analyzing large quantities of data from multiple publications to increase statistical power and uncover explanatory patterns. This paper describes the ways in which meta-analysis has been applied to support claims and co...

This special issue brings together a selection of papers that not merely present agronomic research findings, but critically review orientations, methodologies and research practices in agronomy. The focus is on agronomic research as it conducted as component of rural development efforts in the global South or, in short, development-oriented agrono...

In their response to our paper on the problems of using on-farm trials in efforts to scale-out new crop production technologies and practices among smallholder farmers, Wall et al . (2018) focus on our descriptions of on-farm trials in just one of the three case studies of Agricultural Research for Development (AR4D) projects that were presented. T...

Innovation platforms are fast becoming part of the mantra of agricultural research for development projects and programmes. Their basic tenet is that stakeholders depend on one another to achieve agricultural development outcomes, and hence need a space where they can learn, negotiate, and coordinate to overcome challenges and capture opportunities...

Creating typologies is a way to summarize the large heterogeneity of smallholder farming systems into a few farm types. Various methods exist, commonly using statistical analysis, to create these typologies. We demonstrate that the methodological decisions on data collection, variable selection, data-reduction and clustering techniques can bear a l...

Data used for the typology construction. (XLSX)

The increasingly complex challenges facing agricultural systems require problem-solving processes and systems analysis (SA) tools that engage multiple actors across disciplines. In this article, we employ the theory of af-fordances to unravel what tools may furnish users, and how those affordances contribute to a tool's usefulness in co-design and...

Innovation platforms are fast becoming part of the mantra of agricultural research for development projects and programmes. Their basic tenet is that stakeholders depend on one another to achieve agricultural development outcomes, and hence need a space where they can learn, negotiate and coordinate to overcome challenges and capture opportunities...

Changes in donor priorities have meant that agronomists working in the tropics find themselves in a fundamentally new operational space, one that demands rapid improvements in farmers' livelihoods resulting from the large-scale adoption of new technologies and crop management practices. As a result, on-farm trials in contemporary Agricultural Resea...

Young people are increasingly linked to targeted agriculture and food security interventions. In Africa, the argument is that the combination of agricultural value chains, technology and entrepreneurship will unlock a sweet spot for youth employment. This article examines this argument from a rural transformations perspective. A framework is propos...

Innovation Platforms are increasingly being proposed and used in agricultural research for development project and programs. Innovation Platforms provide space to farmers, agricultural service providers, researchers, private sector and other stakeholders to jointly identify, analyse and overcome constraints to agricultural development. Although inn...

On-farm demonstration-trials are a common strategy to introduce new technologies to farmers, while simultan- eously evaluating these technologies’ performance under farmer conditions. The current study focuses on con- servation agriculture (CA) technology adoption dynamics among a small group of farmers who can be considered increasingly knowledgea...

Innovation Platforms are fast becoming part of the mantra of agricultural research for development projects and programmes. Their basic tenet is that stakeholders depend on one another to achieve agricultural development outcomes, and hence need a space where they can learn, negotiate, and coordinate to overcome challenges and capture opportunities...

The notion of adoption is central to efforts to measure technological change in African agriculture, and plays an important role in the evaluation of return on investment in agricultural research and technology development. However, the adoption concept, as it is commonly used in both the literature and development research practice, is seriously f...

It is remarkable that despite wide-ranging, in-depth studies over many years, almost no conservation agriculture (CA) studies consider gender and gender relations as a potential explanatory factor for (low) adoption rates. This is important because CA demands new ways of working with the farm system. Implementation will inevitably involve a realloc...

Global support for Conservation Agriculture (CA) as a pathway to Sustainable Intensification is strong. CA revolves around three principles: no-till (or minimal soil disturbance), soil cover, and crop rotation. The benefits arising from the ease of crop management, energy/cost/time savings, and soil and water conservation led to widespread adoption...

An emerging perspective on Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) in Zimbabwe is that increased authoritarianism in governance has enabled elite capture of wildlife resources and silenced local people's voices. This paper qualifies this perspective, showing how ordinary people continue to raise their concerns about local governance. In...

Rural households in semi-arid areas of southern Africa are confronted with numerous hazards that threaten the household food base. The new wildlife policy of establishing transfrontier conservation areas aims to increase conservation of wildlife resources while improving local livelihoods. This policy can be better appreciated by local people if it...

We suggest that a recent commentary piece in The Geographical Journal on Conservation Agriculture (CA) and the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) (Kassam and Brammer 2012 was misleading because it drew very selectively from the literature, and presented its conclusions as both widely accepted and uncontroversial. Kassam and Brammer's intervention...

The introduction of transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa was based on an enchanting promise: simultaneously contributing to global biodiversity conservation initiatives, regional peace and integration, and the sustainable socio-economic development of rural communities. Cross-border collaboration and eco-tourism became seen a...

In semi-arid areas drought results in cattle death making people vulnerable to poverty. Drought conditions are set to increase, as climate change is increasingly becoming an important threat to food security. Ethnobotanical studies continue to reveal important adaptation measures that can reduce the negative effects of drought. In southern Africa,...

This book chapter looks at the promotion of Conservation Agriculture (CA) for African smallholder farmers in southern Africa. It investigates the development of what can be typified as an ‘epistemic community’ on CA and illuminates how CA became a policy success sanctioned by religion, despite earlier agronomic research suggesting the value of othe...

Erosion > natural soil formation = NOT sustainable. Tillage is incompatible with sustainable agriculture! Further promotion of tillage-based agriculture in Africa is irresponsible. … research questions are NOT WHEN and WHERE Conservation Agriculture is applicable, but 'HOW' it can be best made work and upscaled.

Final version received ???? EK ABSTRACT Agricultural intensification, or increasing yield, has been a persistent theme in policy interventions in African smallholder agriculture. This article focuses on two hegemonic policy models of such intensification: (1) the 'Alvord model' of plough-based, integrated crop-livestock farming promoted in colonial...

Feedback mechanisms are important in the analysis of vulnerability and resilience of social-ecological systems, as well as in the analysis of livelihoods, but how to evaluate systems with direct feedbacks has been a great challenge. We applied fuzzy cognitive mapping, a tool that allows analysis of both direct and indirect feedbacks and can be used...

Zimbabwe’s Mid-Zambezi Valley is of global importance for the emblematic mega-fauna of Africa. Over the past 30 years rapid land use change in this area has substantially reduced wildlife habitat. Tsetse control operations are often blamed for this. In this study, we quantify this change for the Dande Communal Area, Mbire District, of the Mid-Zambe...

Zimbabwe’s Mid-Zambezi Valley is of global importance for the emblematic mega-fauna of Africa. Over the past 30 years rapid land use change in this area has substantially reduced wildlife habitat. Tsetse control operations are often blamed for this. In this study, we quantify this change for the Dande Communal Area, Mbire District, of the Mid-Zambe...

There is an apparent contrast between Conservation Agriculture (CA) as a labour-saving farming method and the labour requirements of technologies promoted under this banner. In small-scale farmers' vernacular the most common package promoted in Zimbabwe – hand hoe basin-digging with manual weeding, also known as 'Conservation Farming' (CF) – is som...

Agricultural intensification, or increasing yield, has been a persistent theme in policy interventions in African smallholder agriculture. This article focuses on two hegemonic policy models of such intensification: (1) the ‘Alvord model’ of plough-based, integrated crop-livestock farming promoted in colonial Zimbabwe; and (2) minimum-tillage mulch...

Competing claims on natural resources become increasingly acute, with the poor being most vulnerable to adverse outcomes of such competition. A major challenge for science and policy is to progress from facilitating univocal use to guiding stakeholders in dealing with potentially conflicting uses of natural resources. The development of novel, more...

Zimbabwes current crisis arguably constitutes one of Africas most contentious issues. What once appeared to be a thriving economy exporting maize to neighbouring countries has turned in the course of a few years into a country facing recurrent food shortages. Craig Richardsons recent article in African Affairs explores the collapse of Zimbabwes eco...

In academic and policy thinking, competing claims on land are often viewed in terms of conflicting interests over productive resource use. Within this line of theoretical argumentation tenure security is a prerequisite for increases in productivity, while a lack of it is assumed to be a major impediment to the development of African smallholder agr...

International migration from Malawi has changed profoundly since centrally organized mine migration to South Africa ended in the 1980s. Contemporary movements are more diverse and less tied to labour, as informal trade has developed alongside. This article replaces a common ‘productivist’ perspective on migration with a decentralized approach, usin...

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Recent studies of witchcraft and sorcery in Africa have described this domain as an all–powerful and inescapable discourse. This article, on a migrant labour society in Zimbabwe, discloses a situation in which this discourse and its interpretation are contested. It shows how existential insecurity, which gives rise to witchcraft accusations, relate...

The power of the state to impose its self-produced categories of thought poses a major problem to Zimbabwe historiography which has often taken as unproblematic the relation between knowledge about, and control over, African societies as presented in the state's archives. This article challenges this hegemonic view of the colonial state, presenting...

This book consists of four articles containing detailed ethnographic studies of people who are commonly known as migrant workers.Conventional studies on rural-urban migration and urbanisation have often examined such people in either rural or urban social situations,analysing respectively the consequences of out-migration for the rural society and...

In the academic debate on labour migration and urbanisation in Southern Africa the persistence of links between urban workers and people in rural areas has proved a pertinent issue. As is implied by the term labour migration, economic forces have always been regarded as a major determinant of migratory behaviour. State-centred perspectives have dom...

BOOK REVIEW

Conflicts over land, a major theme in Zimbabwe's rural history, are widely recognized as 'most serious' in the densely populated Communal Areas. Pressure on land in these areas is considerable because of population growth and the segregationist policies of the colonial government that concentrated Africans on marginal lands. Land scarcity in the Co...