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Digital agricultural extension effectiveness (RCT evidence)
Digital advice changes what farmers buy. It changes yield much less, and measured income least of all. That pattern holds across randomised trials covering hundreds of thousands of farmers in East Africa, India and West Africa. The useful question is not whether digital extension works, but which part of it works — and the answer is not the part most programmes plan to invest in.
How to Increase Potato Yield, From Seed to Storage
Potato yield is decided by how many days a healthy canopy stays green. That single idea explains why degenerated seed, late blight, badly timed irrigation, and storage rot all cost yield in the same way — they cut canopy days or destroy what those days earned. Here is what the research from Ethiopia, Kenya, Europe and North America shows about which losses cost the most, and what to do first.
Agricultural Cooperative Member Retention: Beyond Price
Cooperatives compete on price because price is easy to measure. But the research on side-selling points somewhere else: members leave over trust, payment timing, and whether anyone from the cooperative knows their fields. This article works through the published evidence, the agronomist-to-member ratios four large cooperatives actually disclose, and the arithmetic that tells you what your technical department has to prevent in order to pay for itself.
Wheat Yield and Quality: The Two Windows That Decide It
Wheat yield and quality are not decided across the whole season. They are decided in two short windows: the month around flowering, which sets grain number, and the weeks of grain filling, which set grain weight and protein. The practices that position a crop well for those two windows outperform almost everything else — and the most powerful of them costs nothing.
How to Increase Corn Yield: Four Critical Stages
Most corn yield is decided in four short periods, and none of them can be repaired afterwards. Unlike wheat or soybean, corn has one ear per plant and no way to compensate for a poor start. This article walks through planting, stand establishment, nitrogen timing and the silking window, with the numbers behind each decision and a worked nitrogen example.
Tomato Diseases: How to Identify and Prevent Them
Most tomato disease losses do not come from failing to name the pathogen. They come from naming it correctly at a moment when nothing can be done. This guide covers the tomato diseases that matter most worldwide, the field signs that separate them, and the far more useful question behind every diagnosis: is this a spray decision, or a next-season decision?
Regenerative Agriculture Has a Definition Problem
Regenerative agriculture has no single agreed definition. In journals, certification schemes, and corporate sourcing programs, the term means different—sometimes conflicting—things. That inconsistency is not a communication problem. It traces directly to how the definitions are built, and it shapes what farmers get paid for.
The Five Principles of Soil Health: What the Evidence Says URL slug: five-principles-soil-health
The five principles of soil health — minimize disturbance, keep soil covered, keep living roots, maximize diversity, and integrate livestock — have shaped farm advice worldwide. They are a useful starting point. But a growing body of field research shows they behave less like universal laws and more like context-dependent tools. Some hold almost everywhere; others reverse in the wrong climate or system. Knowing the difference matters.
Farm Record Keeping: What the Data Says It's Worth
Record keeping is usually pitched as discipline: a virtue farmers should practice. The evidence says something more useful. Farms that keep records earn measurably more per hectare — but only when the records feed decisions during the season, not a folder at year-end. Here is what the studies actually found, and which four records do the work.
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