Farmers’ Motivation and Biophysical Impact of using Cordia africana and Albizia coriaria on Coffee-Bean Intercrops in the Mt Elgon Region (Uganda)
type: CreativeWork
description: Farmers in developing countries are struggling to feed families due to low crop yields resulting from land degradation, land use pressures and unsustainable use of water resources. While deliberate integration of trees into farming systems (agroforestry) has been practiced traditionally in the Mt. Elgon region of Uganda since time immemorial, with modernisation of society and commercialisation of agriculture, many farmers are motivated to dismantle agroforestry systems in favour of monocultural farming systems. The science needed to improve agroforestry in the Mt Elgon region should focus on tree-crop water interactions because the competition for light and water is one of the main reasons that farmers remove trees in favour of annual crops. Additionally, long-term adoption of agroforestry has been negatively affected by an underlying culture of financial expectancy and highly subsidized extension by research and development programmes, leading to ‘pseudo adoption’. I contend that modernised agroforestry practices, informed by science generated in a participatory manner, have the promise of improving household food security, livelihoods and resilience. The study is aligned to a pragmatic interdisciplinary research approach to embrace the domains of both biophysical science (tree-water use and crop productivity studies) and social science (farmer motivations and perceptions). It generally demonstrates effective application‐oriented research and farmer decision-making, with a specific case of managing trees in a relevant agroforestry system. The study seeks to understand how farmers’ knowledge and attitudes towards agroforestry change in response to exposure to the generation of scientific information from biophysical experiments. The four central research questions for this research are: (i) what influences the intentions of smallholder farmers in Mt. Elgon region to plant and retain trees on their farms?; (ii) what factors influence farmers’ perceptions of the impac…
abstract: Farmers in developing countries are struggling to feed families due to low crop yields resulting from land degradation, land use pressures and unsustainable use of water resources. While deliberate integration of trees into farming systems (agroforestry) has been practiced traditionally in the Mt. Elgon region of Uganda since time immemorial, with modernisation of society and commercialisation of agriculture, many farmers are motivated to dismantle agroforestry systems in favour of monocultural farming systems. The science needed to improve agroforestry in the Mt Elgon region should focus on tree-crop water interactions because the competition for light and water is one of the main reasons that farmers remove trees in favour of annual crops. Additionally, long-term adoption of agroforestry has been negatively affected by an underlying culture of financial expectancy and highly subsidized extension by research and development programmes, leading to ‘pseudo adoption’. I contend that modernised agroforestry practices, informed by science generated in a participatory manner, have the promise of improving household food security, livelihoods and resilience. The study is aligned to a pragmatic interdisciplinary research approach to embrace the domains of both biophysical science (tree-water use and crop productivity studies) and social science (farmer motivations and perceptions). It generally demonstrates effective application‐oriented research and farmer decision-making, with a specific case of managing trees in a relevant agroforestry system. The study seeks to understand how farmers’ knowledge and attitudes towards agroforestry change in response to exposure to the generation of scientific information from biophysical experiments. The four central research questions for this research are: (i) what influences the intentions of smallholder farmers in Mt. Elgon region to plant and retain trees on their farms?; (ii) what factors influence farmers’ perceptions of the impac…
author: Buyinza, Joel
language: en
keywords: tree water use, agroforestry, perceptions, crop productivity, motivation, extension, interdisciplinary research
date published: 2021
date modified: 2026-07-24T00:50:39Z
provider: University of Adelaide
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Adelaide

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/2440/134173