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Plot
or field level technologies are the basis of the productive use of
landscapes by farming households, and knowledge that clarifies the
consequences of the main options for land management with or without
trees is still a critical requirement for all farmers while past
research efforts have been biased towards ‘packaged’
technologies; household level decisions on adoption or non-adoption
of agroforestry technologies for specific parts of their farm are
often still poorly understood, and thus much of current
‘extension’ efforts are ineffective and inefficient; in any use
of productive resources there are trade-offs between short-term
profitability (‘use’, ‘harvest’), long-term productivity
(‘plant’, ‘care for’) and the ‘production’ of
environmental service functions at the farm level - recognition of
such tradeoffs in relation to the land, labour and financial capital
resource base of a farm has to form the basis for any
‘environmental service rewards’. |
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Our
notion of ‘farms’ and ‘farmers’ is a broad one that includes
farmers with farms that are more or less exclusively owned (at least
de facto) and operated by households, but also household field crop
'plots' within rotational forest fallow systems that are allocated
(and reallocated) and at least partially managed within a broader
community framework. Moreover, in all areas where activities like
'community forestry' are being recognized and/or promoted,
households also engage in production and/or conservation activities
on 'plots' of village common lands through community organizational
arrangements. |
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Farmers' Land
Management