Agriculture faces three challenges in the coming decades. Agriculture faces an agronomic challenge in producing the food, fiber, and fuel for an increasing population. Agriculture faces an environmental challenge in producing this food, fiber, and fuel with a reduced footprint so as to conserve...

The rapid spread of mobile phones across the developing world offers opportunities to improve service delivery for small-scale farmers. International and local companies have already started to capitalize on these opportunities although many mobile phone-enabled services are still at an early...

Hunger has become ever more complex, and therefore efforts to sustainably eradicate hunger and malnutrition depend on policies and programs that match these complexities. Innovations are critical for progress. However, they require increased public and private investments as well. Key elements...

Some entry barriers in agricultural and agro-processing value chains, particularly for smallholder farmers and small/medium-sized processors, can be overcome with innovation and technology adoption. Technologies and innovation in these sectors have been both radical and incremental, ranging...

African farm systems remain the least mechanized of all continents. There were substantial state-led efforts to promote agricultural mechanization during the 1960s and 1970s, but these efforts failed, which led to a subsequent neglect of mechanization, both in practice and in academia. In...

Untenable use of factors of production is causing severe land degradation and food insecurity problems especially in developing world. Land degradation threatens the ecosystem health and food security worldwide and will remain high priority on international agenda. Conservation agriculture (CA)...

Low adoption of productive agricultural technologies is a puzzle. Agricultural extension services rely on external agents to communicate with farmers, although social networks are known to be the most credible source of information about new technologies. We conduct a large-scale field...

Agricultural mechanization is on the rise in Africa. A widespread replacement of manual labor will change the face of African agriculture. Despite this potentially transformative role, only few studies have looked at the potential effects of mechanization empirically, mostly focusing on yields...

In this chapter we compute measures of total factor productivity (TFP) growth for developing countries and then contrast TFP growth with technological capital indexes. In developing these indexes, we incorporate schooling capital to yield two new indexes: Invention-Innovation Capital and...