Intra-household decision-making shapes smallholder agricultural production, marketing, and consumption, yet empirical research conceptualizes it in ways that obscure underlying power dynamics. This study examines how decision-making processes unfold between men and women within sorghum-farming households in Kenya's Lake Victoria region. Drawing on focus groups and in-depth household interviews, we apply an inductive thematic analysis to examine how responsibility, authority, and control are distributed and negotiated in the crop's production and utilization cycle. Findings show a gendered division of labor: decision-making is widely described as “joint,” yet in practice, it is negotiated within unequal power relations, with strategic decisions remaining predominantly male. Women shoulder primary responsibility for household food management despite having limited control over productive resources, creating a responsibility–authority gap in the household. Cultural norms and traditions function as informal institutions that reinforce gendered hierarchies and legitimize asymmetric decision-making. Sorghum's dual role as both a subsistence and a commercial crop amplifies these dynamics, generating gendered trade-offs that reflect underlying inequalities in authority and control. This study demonstrates that joint decision-making often masks unequal power relations, highlighting the need for a deeper understanding of women's agency. Gender-transformative dialogues that involve couples and communities and are integrated into existing farmer training and extension activities may help to renegotiate roles, expectations, and household decision-making.
The study investigated the impact of drought on farmers' preparedness and mitigation practices in South Africa's agricultural sector and identified their skills gaps in drought management and associated training needs. Using a multi-stage purposive sampling method, 192 farmers (120 subsistence and 72 small-scale commercial) were interviewed across dry agroecological zones in the Free State, Eastern Cape, Northern Cape, and Western Cape provinces of South Africa. The results indicate that the primary socioeconomic impacts were reduced household food security (reported by 80% of participants) and increased poverty (>= 60%). Environmentally, reduced water availability (>80%) and grazing land deterioration (>64%) were the most cited impacts. Key coping strategies included supplementary feeding (71%) and livestock sales (55%). The results of the ordinal regression analysis indicated that age and gender were associated with a lower capacity to cope with drought, whereas education, income source, and access to extension services enhanced farmers' coping ability (P <= 0.05). Additionally, age, education, access to extension services, and agricultural training negatively influenced farmers' need for drought management training (P <= .05). Notably, a widespread lack of skills in drought monitoring, early warning systems, and water management was identified across farming types. The study concluded that targeted government interventions should prioritize adequately resourcing extension services and systematically building farmers' capacities to manage the escalating frequency and severity of droughts.
The circulation of low-quality agricultural inputs remains a persistent concern in sub-Saharan Africa, with important implications for farmer investment and market development. In vegetable seed systems, where private actors play a central role, information asymmetries and weak enforcement mechanisms create uncertainty about product quality at the point of sale. This article examines how trust operates at the last mile of vegetable seed distribution in northern Nigeria, focusing on how signals of seed quality shape farmers’ sourcing decisions. It centres primarily on tomato, which is the dominant commercial vegetable crop. A qualitative research design was employed using framework analysis, drawing on focus group discussions with vegetable farmers and interviews with agrodealers. The findings showed that farmers relied on a combination of product signals (such as packaging, branding and labelling) and agrodealer characteristics (including social capital, knowledge, shop outlook and accountability) when making purchasing decisions. Trust developed gradually through repeated interactions, and agrodealers played a broader role beyond input provision by offering credit, information and tailored services. Overall, the results suggest that vegetable seed markets are not purely transactional but are shaped by social relationships and learning processes. Strengthening seed system performance therefore requires attention to the last mile of distribution, including supporting agrodealers in maintaining quality and reliability, as well as enhancing farmers’ ability to interpret product signals.
Agrivoltaics is often justified by the joint production of food or forage and electricity. Yet co-location does not show that farming can remain viable for the life of a solar asset. Existing standards and policy guidance already refer to primary agricultural use or continuity. Their thresholds are important, but they do not by themselves provide a cross-context test of whether a functioning farm system is preserved. This Perspective develops agricultural continuity as a non-compensatory decision rule for food-system claims. The test has four conditions: usable agricultural space, a commercially credible production plan, effective decision rights for the agricultural operator, and safe, adaptable operations. All four conditions must be satisfied. Strong electricity output, average yield, or an environmental co-benefit cannot compensate for failure of one condition. The framework links infrastructure design and governance to food availability, access, stability, sustainability, and agency. It can be applied at site selection, design review, contracting, commissioning, and periodic operation reviews. Environmental life cycle assessment, energy performance, and farm economics remain essential parallel assessments; they should not be folded into the continuity threshold. The framework is conceptual and requires validation across farm types, climates, ownership models, and regulatory settings. Its value lies in making agricultural claims testable and in identifying correctable failure points before long-lived infrastructure locks them in.
Agricultural innovation holds significant potential to enhance productivity, sustainability, and rural livelihoods; yet many innovations remain confined to research output rather than achieving farmer adoption. A useful precedent for addressing this type of pipeline fragmentation exists in the health sciences, where translational research models have systematically tracked innovations from discovery to practice. Despite decades of investment in agricultural innovation systems, no framework traces the full journey from research output to sustained farmer adoption with the sequential precision applied in biomedical translational research. To examine where the innovation pipeline fractures and why, this paper presents a PRISMA-Scr scoping review of 357 studies screened from 14,303 records across Scopus, Web of Science, CAB Abstracts, Google Scholar, and grey literature repositories, coded against four-stage translational model: RIS (Research and Innovation Supply), VAL (Validation), BRAND (Branding and Packaging), and ADOPT (Adoption and Diffusion). Here we show for the first time that 60.8% of agricultural innovation studies address only a single translational stage, that validation remains the least documented function at 18.5%, and that the translational vocabulary that transformed biomedicine remains virtually absent as a named paradigm in agriculture. Studies incorporating BRAND activities covered an average of 44% more pipeline stages, identifying farmer-facing communication as the critical coupling between the technocratic and sociocultural dimensions of innovation, while Indonesia's 10 included studies reveal a complete validation gap and near-total absence of strategically designed BRAND activities. We propose the TRAIN (Translational Research-to-Adoption Innovation Nexus) framework, which conceptualizes the innovation pipeline as functionally distinct wagons on a directed train, enabling policymakers and researchers to diagnose translational gaps relative to specific thematic priorities and design programs that connect research to farmer reality.
