Suchergebnisse

AbstractTo foster the adoption of sustainable intensification practices amongst Ghana's farmers, they are widely promoted through training sessions provided by development organizations, companies, and the public extension service. We investigate whether these training sessions are effective and find that they are effective only for the diffusion of organic fertilizers but not for mulching. We suggest that this comes from the complexity of the innovations. Mulching is one of the simplest sustainable intensification technologies. It diffuses easily through peer learning and, after an initial training delivered to a critical mass of farmers, does not require training anymore. The use of organic fertilizers, in contrast, requires more specific knowledge and adaptation, which limits the effectiveness of peer learning and increases the effectiveness of training. This suggests that to achieve a widespread diffusion of sustainable intensification amongst Ghana's farmers, training sessions should focus on those practices that are complex and thus difficult to learn from peers.

AbstractAgricultural and other fields of economics have always co‐evolved and benefitted from each other's insights. Over time, a general convergence of all social sciences began, and various fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science started to overlap with general and agricultural economics. Within economics, it was especially the rise of behavioral economics, that has steered the field toward the other social sciences. It departs from the assumption of perfectly rational expected utility maximizers and allows for greater diversity in decision‐makers' objectives and constraints. Agricultural economics has been early to recognize the need to make economic choice models more realistic. This can be explained by the particularities of agricultural economics and agriculture. Agricultural economists are tasked with solving specific, practical problems, and thus behavioral deviations from model predictions have always been salient and relevant to policy recommendations. Then, farmers—and to some extent also consumers—make choices in particularly complex and uncertain environments and must use all strategic tools at their disposal to deal with their "bounded rationality". These include the reliance on culture and other heuristics. Agricultural economics continues to synergize economic theory and practice with insights from other disciplines and real‐world experiences and is an important driver towards further unification of all social sciences.