As I mentioned in my recent blogpost refered to above, the dominant vision in agricultural water management remains one of looking at crops, not considering diversification, nor livestock and fisheries. Moreover, the focus—be it during the World Water Week workshop on rainfed production or in a recent paper in Nature—is on crop yields and not the income generated for farmers, which is what counts for the farmer as rightly pointed by Terry.
Market incentives are the engine that drives the adoption of sustainable technologies such as conservation agriculture, rainwater harvesting or sustainable livestock production. My recent example of local markets for goats in Zimbabwe shows that when a poor farming woman can sell 3 goats per year for a total of 180 US$ instead of a meager 25kg of her maize harvest, it can be a sufficient incentive to adopt innovation.
As I mentioned in my recent blogpost refered to above, the dominant vision in agricultural water management remains one of looking at crops, not considering diversification, nor livestock and fisheries. Moreover, the focus—be it during the World Water Week workshop on rainfed production or in a recent paper in Nature—is on crop yields and not the income generated for farmers, which is what counts for the farmer as rightly pointed by Terry.
Market incentives are the engine that drives the adoption of sustainable technologies such as conservation agriculture, rainwater harvesting or sustainable livestock production. My recent example of local markets for goats in Zimbabwe shows that when a poor farming woman can sell 3 goats per year for a total of 180 US$ instead of a meager 25kg of her maize harvest, it can be a sufficient incentive to adopt innovation.