Farming For The Future Communication

Today family farming is the predominant form of agriculture in the world. Communication lies at the core of the process of change that involves family farming. Smallholder family farmers and rural communities require access to information and communication to make their voices heard and change their lives for the better. This implies including communication for development (ComDev) as part of agricultural and rural development policies in order to promote dialogue and participation, harnessing the potential of new ICTs (such as mobile phones, the internet and computer-based applications) in combination with local media (such as community radio). This document has been prepared to inspire reflection on the role of communication in advancing family farming. It provides examples of ComDev approaches applied to farming and rural development with special attention to the experiences generated by farmers' organizations.

Today, the general public craves information on food and agriculture with an unprecedented passion. But the agricultural sector, unaccustomed to an interested and inquisitive society, has largely failed to respond to the public’s demands for information. Instead, corporations, time-pressed journalists, bloggers, media celebrities, film-makers, authors and concerned consumers jumped in to fill the void. Food is emotional, and these players - some well-intentioned and others not - got a lot of traction playing off consumer fears of the unknown. This critical and timely book explains how changing demographics, cultural shifts, technological advances and agriculture’s silence all combined to create the perfect storm – a great chasm between those who know, and those who don’t know, agriculture. The ramifications of a poorly-informed consumer base are now becoming clear in our policy debates and consumer-driven business decisions. There is a lot of common ground between the agricultural sector and their consumer base, but each group largely fails to appreciate it, and the consequences of such a divide grow increasingly dire. Drawing on a wide-range of expertise, from leading agricultural researchers to major agribusiness leaders to consumer advocates, Eise and Hodde lay out exactly why communication is so urgently critical to our modern-day agricultural system. They outline the major themes affecting agricultural communication – perception, emotion, technology, science - and what we can do now to improve the debate and safeguard our future food supply for generations to come.This book is suitable for those who study agriculture, environmental economics and mass media and communication.

The 2014 International Conference on Future Communication, Information and Computer Science (FCICS 2014) was held May 22-23, 2014 in Beijing, China. The objective of FCICS 2014 was to provide a platform for researchers, engineers and academics as well as industrial professionals from all over the world to present their research results and developm

Advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) have made information available to more people than ever before. These advances have also substantially increased their capacity to connect with each other in a continuously expanding number of ways. Rural women are currently (and have always been) last in line in terms of ICT access and use, even though women stand more to gain than most from active participation and engagement with these resources. Evidence suggests that the ICT sector is both urban- and male-centric, ranging from the design of ICTs to the gender of sector employees and decision-makers. Representation in the media is also predominantly male. The aim of this paper is to bring rural communities, and women and other marginalized groups in particular, back into the centre of conversations on ICTs and ICT4D.

Part I: low-external-input and sustainable agriculture (leisa): an emerging option; Agriculture and sustainability; Sustainability and farmers: making decisions at the farm level; Technology development by farmers; Part II: Priciples and possibilities of leisa; Low-external-input farming and agroecology; Basic ecological principles of leisa; Development of leisa systems; Part III: Linking farmers and scientists in developing leisa technologies; Actors and actitities in developing leisa technologies; Participatory technology development in practice: process and methods; Appendices; Appendix A some promising leisa techniques and practices; Appendix B glossary of key terms; Appendix C useful contacts and sources of further information; References; Index.

The 1990s were a hurricane of change for American farming, and the Beginning Farmer Center (BFC) was caught in the storm. Today's successful farmer must learn modern professional communications to survive in a world of corporate farming, globalisation and government over-regulation. This significant new book presents a cogent analysis of far reaching changes rocking the heartland of America.

Changes in market organisation, climatic conditions and societal demands on food quality, animal welfare and environmental quality have created new conditions for farming families as well as for researchers and policy makers. New social, technical and economic solutions are needed for farming and rural areas. This book presents new perspectives for farms, farm products and rural areas, many of which were collectively developed by coalitions of farmers, farmer representatives, researchers, civilians and/or policy makers. Contributions are made from those involved in crop and animal production worldwide offering sections on natural resources management, development of sustainable rural systems, future perspectives for farming families, knowledge systems in transition and learning processes in multi-stakeholder processes. This unique collection of contributions, presenting insights from bio-physical as well as social sciences, shows where practice meets analysis and reflection and offers new perspectives for rural areas throughout the world.