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Farmers can respond by shifting their production into less labor-intensive crops

However, domestic food demands continue to increase and diversify, creating important employment opportunities in the off-farm AFS. These changes mean that both traditional and new digital technologies can be leveraged to induce a productive exit out of agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa while maintaining a competitive agricultural workforce on and off the farm in the chains elsewhere. Three key policy implications emerge. First, productivity-enhancing investment in agriculture must accelerate in the lower-income countries and proceed at least in tandem with the movement of workers off the farm elsewhere. Populations will continue to grow despite slowing birthrates, and food production will have to expand to keep pace. The movement of workers off the farm to meet the demand for other goods requires producing more food with fewer workers, once underemployed labor has been activated. Historically in today’s high-income countries, agricultural extension and public investments in infrastructure, from irrigation to information, marketing institutions, and roads, played a critical supporting role in facilitating the labor exit out of agriculture. They enabled the remaining farmers to earn a living commensurate with non-farm sectors, as competition for workers with the non-farm sectors and downstream food processors intensified. This agenda holds as much today as then. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the agricultural share of public spending continues to be well below that in East Asia . Myriad input, factor, and output market constraints hold agricultural labor productivity back, and integrated solutions that simultaneously overcome a number of these constraints are needed. Inclusive value chain development ,dutch bucket hydroponic which links farmers with buyers in contracting arrangements, offering knowledge, access to credit and inputs , and higher prices in exchange for a consistent volume of high-quality products , provides a market-based solution to do so, though smallholders’ lack of legal protections can be an obstacle .

Given the challenge to develop self-enforcing incentive compliant contracts, iVCD typically does not work well for raising staple crop productivity. Yet, in low income countries, this is where the need and scope for raising labor productivity and poverty reduction is highest. For raising labor productivity in staple crops, more and better public investment in public goods is needed . Second, the scope for iVCD to raise smallholder incomes and benefit the poor and women is greater for non-staples. iVCD also creates jobs off the farm, in the chains and beyond . Success factors of iVCD include careful diagnosis of the competitiveness and sustainability of the product value chain chosen, starting small, involving financial institutions, monitoring producer-buyer relationships, and sustaining capacity building. This is in addition to creating an economic environment that is conducive to investment generally. Developing systems to monitor and enforce food quality standards in the AFS is equally critical. There is clearly a role for agricultural ministries, as well as for the private sector, to ensure that the development and use of labor-saving technologies keeps pace with the movement of workers off-farm. Many questions remain, however, especially on the best entry points for support: through farmer organizations/cooperatives, large anchor firms and/or SMEs, or externally initiated stakeholder platforms. More experiments are needed. In the meantime, appropriate measures will be needed to help SMEs in the transformative food chains see through the decline in liquidity caused by COVID-19 and avoid undue concentration of activity in the long run. Labor-market regulations and other social protections can also be useful in protecting vulnerable populations from exploitation as they transition into non-farm work . Third, investment in people is critical to raise agricultural labor productivity and to make sure that those leaving can access the new jobs in the AFS, as well as other non-farm sectors, and meet the rising economic aspirations of rural youth.

Continued investment in quality rural education, which continues to largely underperform in developing countries, is needed . Increasing educational attainment in rural areas facilitates technology adoption, as well as occupational mobility, and reduces income inequality. This is also important for young women facing social norms that make it difficult to escape from traditional gender roles. Nontraditional skill-building programs and effective agricultural extension systems will be equally needed to build up human capital in regions where traditional education has proven ineffective. The extension system is particularly weak in Sub-Saharan Africa and has been largely neglected for the past couple of decades by governments and donors alike. The 2010s have witnessed a surge in studies on social network or farmer-to-farmer technology extension, which proves more promising especially in combination with public extension than traditional public-sector extension approaches. But several issues remain such as the choice and compensation of appropriate lead farmers . Policy implications are different, but just as immediate, in high income countries. Rich-country farmers will be required to produce more and higher-quality fresh and processed foods for a growing, and increasingly affluent, domestic and global population, and they will be required to do so under increasingly stringent environmental and animal welfare standards. However, they will have to do this with fewer workers. The transition of domestic workers out of farm work largely has run its course in rich countries. The option of importing foreign workers is gradually closing, due to a declining farm labor supply in farm labor exporting countries and a less supportive political environment for immigration, particularly of low-skilled workers, in high-income countries. Three key policy implications emerge for high-income countries in this era of growing farm labor scarcity: First, farmers in high income countries will increasingly need to look beyond immigration policy as an answer to farm labor scarcity —especially in the medium and long run.

Guest worker programs can expand as a short-run response to farm labor scarcity. However, as the structural transformation progresses in farm labor-exporting countries and political resistance to importing low-skilled farm workers intensifies, the immigration solution to the farm labor problem becomes less of an option. This does not mean that immigration will not continue to play a central role in farm labor markets throughout the developed world for some time. But farmers will need to take steps to retain an aging, mostly immigrant, workforce while pursuing available options to contract new workers from abroad. International farm labor migration could continue to be a much-needed channel for sharing prosperity across nations and reducing poverty in the world’s poorest countries. For this, however, a counternarrative needs to take hold rapidly. If not, its days may be numbered prematurely, especially now that the COVID-19 pandemic so clearly exposed the agri-food sector’s dependence on immigrant labor and the logistical challenges this may entail, eroding support for reliance on immigrant agricultural labor even further. Second, increasingly sophisticated technological change is going to be a fundamental feature of the food supply chain,dutch buckets system from farming to food processing. Productivity-enhancing investments likely will include the use of highly-advanced robotic systems that will dramatically reduce the need for workers . Scouring the landscape in today’s high-income countries, we find automation success stories like the ones described earlier in this paper, as well as major challenges. There is a danger that automation will not happen quickly enough to enable farmers to maintain their competitiveness in a high wage, labor-scarce, world.However, more affluent consumers will demand fresh, locally-grown fruits and vegetables, as well as specific qualities like organics, environmentally friendly production practices, fair trade, and possibly better labor practices, all of which tend to increase labor demands compared to field crops where automation is more advanced. Prices of these fresh fruits and vegetables will rise, causing farmers to think twice about abandoning production as wages rise while intensifying pressure on public and private researchers and policy makers to accelerate the development of labor-saving technologies and deploy the necessary digital infrastructure to run it, including in remote rural areas.

Policymakers will need to keep an eye out for undue concentration of power in the supply of these new technologies and devise adequate policies to ensure competition . Third, a technologically advanced AFS requires a technology-savvy workforce, with more engineers and people capable of working with increasingly complex technologies. As agricultural and food processing technologies become more IT intensive, so do human capital demands all along the AFS. To some extent, developments in IT can help respond to human capital shortages; viz. bar codes in supermarkets and hamburger buttons at fast-food restaurants. Nevertheless, the numbers of workers with little education who pick themselves a living wage will diminish. As new technologies become available for relatively easy-to mechanize crops and routine tasks, the farm workforce will move out of those crops and tasks into ones that have not yet been mechanized and are non-routine . A major policy challenge is to prepare the future farm workforce for technological change while also ensuring that employment opportunities expand as new technologies release workers from crop production. There is no magic bullet to guarantee that automation, human capital formation, and new job creation move apace. It is undeniable that the future holds far-reaching changes in mechanization and automation in developing and developed countries alike. Without it, agriculture and the AFS generally will not be able to keep up with rising food demands and a declining farm labor supply. Inevitably, many farms and farm workers will have difficulty adjusting. Some farms and farmers, particularly larger, wealthier and better educated ones, are in a far better position to experiment with and adopt new labor-saving technologies, including advanced robotics. And some farmers and farm workers, particularly older ones, will have a difficult time shifting to new commodities and tasks; the more technology-savvy farm workforce of the future is likely to be younger and better educated than current workers. Decoupling social insurance from employment, as proposed in Packard et al. , could be a worthwhile social insurance model to mitigate adverse consequences of this transition and avoid the introduction of ineffective agricultural and food policies. The need for greater food system resilience, highlighted by the COVID-19 experience, would also be better served by food trade diversification instead of a reversal to protectionism and food self-sufficiency. Yet, without successful social insurance schemes to help mitigate the adjustment costs and rapid ramp up in agricultural education and extension, the ongoing evolution in the agricultural labor force is bound to raise inequality as well as anti-trade sentiment, including in agri-food. Agricultural production has grown to meet the demands of an increasingly large and wealthy human population. The development of high-yield crop varieties combined with the widespread use of irrigation, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and land use changes that marked the “Green Revolution” have enabled an enormous increase in crop production per area . As a result of these technologies, cereal production has doubled . This increased production is credited with reducing poverty and improving nutrition intake for millions of people worldwide . However, this increase in production also has costs. There are concerns that the loss of natural enemies and biodiversity caused by the increased size and connectivity of agricultural land, the trend toward monocultures, and the conversion of natural habitat—termed “landscape simplification”—makes farms more susceptible to pest outbreaks . With increased risk of pest outbreaks comes enhanced pesticide use. Although other aspects of intensive farming also have negative externalities, such as synthetic fertilizers and eutrophication, pesticides have received some of the most widespread scrutiny and their reduction has become a priority for policy makers, as evidenced by integrated pest management . The emphasis on pesticide use stems from serious human health concerns related to pesticide exposure in farm workers , pesticide residues in food and water sources , and bio-accumulation of pesticides in higher trophic levels . Despite popular ecological thinking that the connection between landscape simplification and pesticide use is clear, both theoretical and empirical studies have found ambiguous results. Agroecological theory holds that landscapes composed of a high proportion of cropland are more susceptible to pest outbreaks because of their habitat homogeneity and reduced natural enemy populations. Therefore, more simplified landscapes would experience more pest problems and consequently use more pesticides. Conversely, economic theory of pesticide use suggests that the application of pesticides by a neighboring farm may have positive externalities for surrounding farms as a result of pesticide drift or pest suppression .

What Are The Easiest Plants To Grow With Hydroponics

Hydroponics can be a great way to grow a variety of plants, and some are easier to cultivate using this method than others. Here are some of the easiest plants to grow with hydroponics,dutch buckets making them suitable choices for beginners:

  1. Lettuce: Lettuce is a popular choice for hydroponic cultivation due to its rapid growth and relatively simple nutrient requirements. Various types of lettuce, such as leaf lettuce and romaine, thrive in hydroponic systems.
  2. Herbs: Herbs like basil, cilantro, parsley, and mint are well-suited to hydroponics. They have compact root systems and grow quickly, making them ideal for small-scale hydroponic setups.
  3. Spinach: Spinach is another leafy green that does well in hydroponic systems. It grows quickly and doesn’t require a lot of space.
  4. Swiss Chard: Swiss chard is a nutrient-dense leafy green that can be grown hydroponically. It’s relatively easy to maintain and produces colorful, edible stems.
  5. Kale: Kale is a hardy leafy green that is well-suited to hydroponics. It’s a nutrient-rich plant and can thrive in a controlled hydroponic environment.
  6. Cherry Tomatoes: Compact varieties of cherry tomatoes, such as “Tiny Tim” or “Patio Princess,” can be grown in hydroponic systems. They require some support for the vines but can yield a good harvest.
  7. Peppers: Bell peppers and chili peppers can be grown hydroponically. They thrive in warm conditions and can produce abundant fruits with proper care.
  8. Cucumbers: Compact cucumber varieties like “Bush Pickle” or “Spacemaster” can be grown in hydroponic systems. Trellising is essential to support their growth.
  9. Green Onions: Green onions, also known as scallions, are easy to grow hydroponically. They don’t require much space and have a relatively short growth cycle.
  10. Radishes: Radishes are fast-growing and can be cultivated hydroponically. They are a good choice for those looking for a quick harvest.

Remember that successful hydroponic gardening requires attention to factors like water quality, nutrient levels, pH, and lighting. While these plants are generally considered easy to grow hydroponically,grow bucket it’s important to research each plant’s specific requirements and tailor your hydroponic system accordingly. Additionally, starting with a simple system and gaining experience will help you become a more proficient hydroponic gardener over time.

Arthropod pests were generally unaffected by local or landscape scale factors

Of importance to urban farmers, multiple on farm practices have been identified that may be implemented to increase CBC in urban farms . To our knowledge, this work has not yet been gathered and synthesized, making it difficult to translate research into practice. Here, we review and summarize relationships between local farm and surrounding landscape effects in UA on pest and natural enemy populations, as well as on the resulting levels of biological control . Our literature review focuses on four questions for UA systems: Which local on-farm practices and off-farm landscape factors affect insect and mite pest populations and their crop damage; natural enemy biodiversity ; ecosystem services through increased biological control; and which practices can be recommended to urban farmers to promote CBC? We searched for peer-reviewed literature, published before February 2019, that measured natural enemy and insect pest richness, abundance, and rates of predation and parasitism in UA systems. We further focused the review on intra-urban studies that measured differences in on-farm composition, practices, and surrounding off-farm landscape attributes to measures of insect abundance, richness, and community composition. We excluded studies that either focused on taxa that do not provide regulating ecosystem services relevant to CBC , or compared pest or natural enemy abundance, richness and composition between urban and rural green spaces, farms, or gardens. We did this because these measures do not explicitly focus on UA or local on farm predictors of arthropods. In some cases,dutch buckets we did include urban-to-rural studies if a subset of the samples met the intra-urban requirement. For these studies, we excluded the reported findings from rural or natural landscapes.

The review protocol followed the PRISMA systematic review framework and the methodologies described in Pullin 2006 . We searched three databases including Web of Science, the United States Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Library database , and the National Center for Biotechnology Information , using search terms that are common in the CBC literature: “Biological control,” “Herbivore,” “Pest,” “Parasitism,” “Natural enemies,” and “Parasitoid.” These terms were paired with “Urban agriculture” and “Urbanization.” Search terms were applied to titles, abstracts, and keywords. Our search protocol identified 675 peer-reviewed publications using this methodology. We removed all duplicates and reviewed the remaining articles for relevance. From these, we identified 15 articles that met our protocol criteria and were selected for review . For each publication, we collected information on authors, title, site location, site sample number, land type , sampling period, methodology, and taxa assessed. We then recorded the statistically significant effects of 16 explanatory variables common among studies for species richness, abundance , and levels of ecosystem services through biological controls . To further identify explanatory variables, and to align variables with reviewed literature, we categorize variables as “local factors” or “landscape factors.” Local factors were defined as biotic and abiotic features of the local agroecosystem , and landscape factors were defined as features of the surrounding landscape . For each explanatory variable, we counted the number of reportable results . Some explanatory variable measures, such as local or landscape factors combined into an index value, or measures that were not clearly defined were categorized as “landscape cover” or “structural diversity” .In four publications, herbivorous taxa were studied that are UA crop pests, but few local factors were presented that explained increases in pest abundance or richness. Moreover, studies often showed inconsistent results, and the only factor repeatedly associated with increased pest richness was increased perennial richness and abundance. Structural diversity of vegetation, host plant density, garden age and soil moisture were also identified as factors affecting herbivore richness and abundance, but these relationships were only measured as significant once.Local factors positively affected parasitoid and predator abundance and richness in thirteen of fifteen reviewed studies, with only 7% of the reported results showing negative effects on natural enemy abundance and richness.

Important local factors that positively affected natural enemy populations included increased floral abundance and richness, increased mulch and leaf litter cover, larger garden size, high plant species richness, more perennials, and increased structural diversity. Garden size was the only factor that differed between predator and parasitoid taxa, with larger gardens positively affecting parasitoid populations and smaller gardens positively affecting predator abundance.We reviewed UA literature to assess how local on-farm management practices and surrounding off-farm landscape features affect herbivorous insect pests, arthropod natural enemies, and measures of conservation biological control. This is a first attempt to synthesize the growing number of case studies in this field. We found that local and landscape factors differentially affect insect pests and their natural enemies, as well as ecosystem services received through biological control. Local on farm diversification and management most commonly affected natural enemy species richness, abundance, and ecosystem services with of reported results showing positive impacts. Relationships between measures of arthropod diversity and impervious urban land cover at the landscape scale are inconsistent, as they have both negative and positive effects on arthropod populations . Some reviewed studies found parasitoid abundance increased, but richness decreased with urban landscape cover , or that these relationships for predators are differential across taxa, region, and landscape scale . The differences across taxa, region, and surrounding urban landscape composition are all important considerations.However, insect pests were the least commonly measured taxa across these studies. Only two reviewed studies focused on intra-urban local and landscape herbivorous pest effects, and most studies did not assess relationships between insect pests and crop damage . Rates of parasitism were also unaffected by local and landscape factors, even though parasitoids are prevalent in urban gardens . Similarly, urban-to-rural studies report that parasitic Hymenoptera may be somewhat resistant to landscape-scale habitat fragmentation in larger non-garden habitat patches . However, in more urbanized landscapes with smaller habitat patches, landscape fragmentation has negative effects on Hymenoptera species diversity .

Our review identified gaps in UA CBC-related research, particularly on the topics of methodology and geographic breadth. The key methodological issues that we found in the literature include: lack of measured temporal effects; inconsistent sampling techniques across studies; coarse taxonomic identification and biodiversity metrics of focal taxa; and difficulty in accessing sufficient landscape data. Only three of the reviewed studies measured temporal effects , and the average sampling period was only 22 weeks. Clearly, more extensive year round sampling is needed to account for possible temporal changes between seasons. To this point,growing lettuce hydroponically local climate measures were rarely reported; only a third of studies measured temperature, and none measured wind speed or humidity. These local abiotic climate-related factors should be considered as climate change will increasingly impact urban arthropods in the coming decades. It is important to consider methods of insect sampling and units of ecosystem function in CBC research. Often the goal of UA studies is to better understand functionally important species distributions in fragmented landscapes with implications for agricultural ecosystem functioning. While measuring the richness and abundance of insects is an essential step to understand species distributions, it does not account for functional effects of biodiversity that are of use to UA practitioners. Nineteen of the studies used pan traps or sticky traps, standard but often superficial methods in insect population studies. These sampling methods can be too broad when investigating biological controls . It would be useful to measure the actual rates of prey consumption, for example, by using exclusion and sentinel prey in relation to natural enemy presence, or by rearing parasitized insects. Emerging technologies such as molecular gut content analysis of predators using DNA-based prey assays are an effective method to link predator to pest . While most studies included multiple methodologies, it would be useful to include more standardization in UA field sampling protocols for biodiversity and biological control to facilitate future meta-analysis. With regard to biodiversity metrics in UA CBC research, most of the reviewed studies offer only a coarse overview of species identification, especially for parasitic Hymenoptera, which are often only identified to super family. Though genus- and species-level identification are time-intensive and require skilled labor, species- or genus-level data is necessary to better investigate species-effects on CBC. This is particularly important because many of the parasitic Hymenoptera in the reviewed studies are aggregated as “beneficial,” but many are hyperparasitoids, or are potentially parasitoids of other natural enemy predators . More research is needed on UA pests because insect pests are the least measured taxa across studies, and most studies do not assess relationships between insect pests and crop damage and yield. Only two reviewed studies focused on intra-urban local and landscape herbivorous pest effects . Additional challenges exist in UA landscape studies, notably the availability of fine-scale landscape data. Urban ecologists have been limited in their access to geographical data at a scale smaller than 30 m.

Many studies use the US National Landscape Cover Database, which includes a measure of the impervious surface, but the scale is inappropriate for complex urban environments particularly, when considering effects on arthropods that respond to habitat heterogeneity at much smaller spatial scales . Ground-proofing landscape composition can necessitate consistent access to a private property which can be challenging. Alternative methodologies have been proposed such as aerial drones with high-resolution cameras, but limits to drone flight plans in residential areas or excluded flight space make flights difficult. We also found a strong bias towards UA studies in North America and Europe. It is unclear as to whether this bias is a relic of the database search itself or there is a distinct lack of literature available.Crop pests in urban landscapes can be challenging to control, and they can have a disproportionate impact on the smaller crop sizes common to urban farms. Herbivorous insect populations in urban areas can persist for more extended periods, have increased fecundity, and can even be larger . Under managed or neglected urban landscapes can exacerbate pest issues. Irregular irrigation, application of fertilizers or pesticides, and higher levels of air pollution can induce plant stress or vigor, creating favorable conditions and refuges for herbivorous pests that can emigrate to urban farms and gardens . Urban agriculture is often practiced without pesticides for health and environmental reasons despite these challenges. Instead, farmers find themselves relying on time and labor-intensive cultural and mechanical practices for pest management. Consequently, urban farmers have shown great interest in agroecological pest management , a proactive ecosystem services based approach that aims to reduce pest abundance and crop damage by increasing natural enemy populations through agroecological practices . For example, increasing vegetative complexity, implementing soil conservation practices, and introducing floral resources for nectarivorous natural enemies. These practices increase the amount of shelter, nectar, and pollenresources on urban farms, increasing natural enemy populations, resulting in increased biological control services . In rural agroecosystems, APM practices, landscape effects, and conservation biological control have been widely studied . Metaanalyses have found that on-farm management practices such as intercropping, crop rotations, and increased structural diversity increase natural enemies’ abundance, diversity, and ability to regulate pest populations . Increased landscape diversity surrounding rural agroecosystems has been shown to mediate arthropod diversity and abundance, with natural enemies showing a positive response to increased landscape complexity . The enemies hypothesis states that increased structural complexity should increase natural enemy abundance, diversity, and associated ecosystem services . This hypothesis has been investigated and questioned in agroecosystem management, with varying results at different spatial and temporal scales, most often in rural contexts. Ostensibly, diversification effects observed in rural agroecosystems should be observed in their urban counterparts. However, the effects of diversification on biological control services and APM in urban agroecosystems regarding this hypothesis are still being explored, especially in how natural enemies are affected by landscape factors such as fragmentation and isolation, common in urban landscapes . The extent of fragmentation effects on organisms in urban environments, and related ES, has been a persistent question, especially in urban agroecosystem management . Roads, parking lots, and buildings increase impervious surfaces, fragmenting and reducing green space connectivity and impacting the quality and area of suitable habitat . The reduction of available and appropriate habitats for urban flora and fauna decreases meta population connectivity and drives a decline in urban species diversity, selecting for more disturbance tolerant species and increasing the chance of localized extinctions .