A post by Dan Milner, PhD student on the Compass programme.
Introduction
This blog describes an approach being developed to deliver rapid classification of farmer strategies. The data comes from a survey conducted with two groups of smallholder farmers (see image 2), one group living in the Taita Hills area of southern Kenya and the other in Yebelo, southern Ethiopia. This work would not have been possible without the support of my supervisors James Hammond, from the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) (and developer of the Rural Household Multi Indicator Survey, RHoMIS, used in this research), as well as Andrew Dowsey, Levi Wolf and Kate Robson Brown from the University of Bristol.
Aims of the project
The goal of my PhD is to contribute a landscape approach to analysing agricultural systems. On-farm practices are an important part of an agricultural system and are one of the trilogy of components that make-up what Rizzo et al (2022) call ‘agricultural landscape dynamics’ – the other two components being Natural Resources and Landscape Patterns. To understand how a farm interacts with and responds to Natural Resources and Landscape Patterns it seems sensible to try and understand not just each farms inputs and outputs but its overall strategy and component practices. (more…)