Yam (Dioscorea spp.) is of great importance to food security, especially in West Africa. However, the loss of soil fertility due to dwindling fallow lands with indigenous nutrient supply poses a challenge for yam cultivation. This study aimed to determine shoot and tuber biomass and nutrient use efficiency of white Guinea yam (Dioscorea rotundata) grown under low- and high-NPK conditions. Six white Guinea yam genotypes were used in field experiments conducted at Ibadan, Nigeria.

In many East African countries, women and men have different levels of access to formal markets for agricultural inputs, including seed, reflecting a combination of gender norms and resource constraints. As a result, women and men may have different levels of participation in—and reliance upon—informal seed systems for sourcing preferred planting material and accessing new crop varieties over time.

Digital technologies and services are rapidly expanding in virtually every aspect of the global economy and society, and the agriculture sector is no exception. This expansion creates new opportunities to deploy massive, agile, personalized, cost-effective, and digitally-enabled agricultural services capable of reaching even the poorest and most vulnerable populations , and driving a new digital revolution in agriculture that may prove to be as consequential as the Green Revolution of 1965-1986.

Maize remains one of the most important cereal crops grown in small-holder farming systems in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)(Cairns et al., 2013). Its cultivation is generally characterized by limited input use and low yields. The low yields are often associated with low soil fertility, pest, and diseases, weeds, low and inappropriate use of inputs such as fertilizers (Sanchez, 2002).

In Tanzania, diets are dominated by starchy staple crops such as maize, levels of malnutrition are high and largely attributed to lack of dietary diversity. We employed fuzzy cognitive mapping to understand the current soybean, maize and chicken value chains, to highlight stakeholder relationships and to identify entry points for value chain integration to support nutritious diets in Tanzania.

Gliricidia sepium (Jacq.) Walp is a well-known agroforestry leguminous tree that provides multiple benefits in different agroecological zones. Its apparent versatility is seen in improving animal feed, cleaning environmental wastes, and healing inflammations. It was also found to have significant benefits in agroforestry due to its ability to enhance soil fertility through nitrogen fixation and green manure. However, this article reviews the use of Gliricidia sepium to improve soil fertility and crop agronomic and nutritional properties.

Farm typologies are often used to reduce the complexity in categorising diverse farming systems, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The resulting typologies can then be used in multiple ways including designing efficient sampling schemes that capture the diversity in smallholder farms, prescribing the selection of certain farm types to which interventions can be targeted or upscaled, or to give context into derived relationships. However, the construction of farm typologies consists of many subjective decisions that are not always obvious or evident to the end-user.

In response to major shocks, governments and international humanitarian agencies often use direct seed distribution as a first level response to help communities stabilize or restart their farming systems. In contrast, CRS uses Seed and Voucher Fairs (S&VFs). After many years of successfully implementing S&VF, CRS developed a new type of seed fair that specifically focuses on the relief-development continuum and diversity, both in household dietary diversity for improved nutrition, and crop diversity for increased farming system resilience.

Persistent food insecurity in the global south has triggered calls for sustainable development worldwide. Moreover, more than a quarter of the world's population suffers from micronutrient deficiencies or hidden hunger. The population bulge, declining soil fertility and inadequate/inappropriate use of farm inputs in Sub-Saharan Africa place it in a precarious position. Multi-nutrient fertilizer blends have been mooted as a key innovation in closing yield gaps and boosting food and nutrition security.

Background: Maize agricultural policy in Mexico has focused on a monofunctional vision of maize as a basic
commercial product, through a bimodal vision of production systems (commercial and subsistence). However, the
evidence suggests that the challenge of thinking about the multifunctionality of this crop must be faced due to the
complexity of its relationship within different strata of society, to more adequately reflect the diversity of systems
based on maize, as well as their flexibility to respond to new challenges and opportunities, and to have better

Analysis of hydro-climatological time series and spatiotemporal dynamics of meteorological variables has become critical in the context of climate change, especially in Southern African countries where rain-fed agriculture is predominant. In this work, we compared modern unsupervised time series and segmentation approaches and commonly used time series models to analyse rainfall regime changes in the coastal, sub-humid and semi-arid regions of Southern Africa.