Farmer support programmes are aimed at assisting in unlocking barriers faced by smallholder farmers. These programmes were implemented many years ago by the public and private sector. However, research continues to show that the increase in the number of these initiatives and in budgets/expenditures have not equally translated into an increase in the number of smallholder farmers advancing to commercial status. Therefore, this evaluation research is focused on assessing the implementation progress of a farmer support programme being implemented in Jozini, KwaZulu-Natal. The aim is to assess whether or not the programme is implemented according to the theory of change and to assess the likelihood of the programme achieving its intended outcomes. Both the quantitative and qualitative approaches were applied to collect and analyse data. Quantitative data was made up of project data and qualitative data was obtained through conducting in-depth interviews with farmers currently participating in the programme. Findings from this paper are expected to add to the existing body of knowledge in terms of strengthening and improving the design of farmer support programmes; to emphasise the importance of conducting implementation evaluations to assess programme performance early in implementation; to better understand what is working or not during implementation; and to understand why this is so.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis examines the life of Mary Brown, a farmer’s wife in mid to late nineteenth century Indiana, through a detailed look at primary source materials including the journals of her husband, letters, and occasional journal entries by herself and her daughters. Mary’s story serves as a case study of the lived experiences of Indiana farm women. This research includes pertinent information regarding the farm tasks she took on both in the house and in the fields. Women did what they had to in order to assure the success of their household. This challenges and rejects the narrative of the homebound and devalued wife. In the case of the Browns, they operated as one unit, wholly committed to the success of the family and farm, not dictated by middle class or urban gender norms. Even in the face of illness, childbirth, and death, these women persevered. Women farmers are an underappreciated historical player in the development of Indiana. The comparative paucity of established works which explore the role of Indiana farmer’s wives’ duties and value shows the need for in-depth research of what life really was like for women in rural Indiana. This lack of scholarship has led to the anonymity of generations of women in Indiana. Farm women were foundational to agricultural enterprises and deserve recognition. To make certain that Hoosier farm women did not remain forgotten, an exhibit was created and story of Mary Brown was shared with the public in a way that allowed new perspectives of the past to be cultivated. This thesis will also share the process and final product of the exhibit component.

The research explores the escalation of the herder-farmer conflict in Nigeria to identify the significant patterns of escalation. Relying on a mixed-method analysis of secondary data and aligning with the analytical anchorage of dynamic systems theory, the research argues that the although Benue and Enugu observe the same herder-farmer the patterns of conflict escalation is neither similar, linear or recurrent. This research submits ethnoreligious antagonism, lawlessness, and exclusionary politics as reasons why the conflict escalated into widespread violence. Adding that each of these elements self- reinforces and influence each other to sustain a coordinated state of violence or maintain peace. It makes a case for pragmatic policies that captures the history and political, economic, and social interaction of states and local government.

The Round Barn is a novel in two parts that tells the story of two Iowa farm families during the period 1915 to 1929, a volatile time in the history of the American farm. The first part of the novel tells the story of Joe Marshall, a young man in conflict with his hard-working farmer father. At sixteen-years-old, Joe must choose whether to leave the farm to pursue his own desires or to stay where he is needed to help keep his financially strapped family afloat. Part two of the novel focuses on Mae Allinson, a woman in her early twenties, who has willingly accepted the responsibility of raising her sister's child after her sister dies in childbirth. By doing so, Mae forsakes the man she was to marry, the man who would take her to Chicago and away from farm life. The round barn, built by Joe Marshall's father in the opening chapter of the novel, serves as a through line linking all the chapters and connecting characters to a specific place. The round barn, in addition to being a stage setting for the action of the novel, has its own story arc, rising out of the Iowa soil in the first chapter, functioning as a working barn through the central part of the novel, then finally falling into disrepair by the end. In the novel, Joe and Mae each seek their own identities within their families, identities that put them in conflict with a family dynamic that is focused on the survival and prosperity of the family as a whole. This conflict forces each character to define for themselves what love, power, freedom, and obligation mean and how far they are willing to go inpursuit of these things. In addition to functioning within their own families, the main characters must also contend with the larger issues that put pressure on the American farm of the time (economics, war, social change, and migration to the urban areas), factors that push and pull the characters in different directions. By telling the story from the positions of two different characters and by spanning the number of years that it does, the novel seeks to show how events and the passage of time transform the individual characters, their families, and the American farm.

As the population increases the demand for food also increases. It is estimated that the population will reach over 8.5 billion by the year 2050. The farming industry is pooling resources to increase food production by developing indoor farming. This practice of growing food indoors can attend to the food security issue which is a positive development in the long run. Indoor farming has been developing over the years and the purpose of the project will be an exploration of how indoor farming is affecting the people who grow these crops, i.e., the indoor farmers. The focus of the project is to understand what are the challenges and pain points of an indoor farmer, in the whole growing process. The human-centered design process is opted in this project to conduct the user studies. The user studies use methodological triangulation which includes in-depth interviews, surveys, and additional methods to gain a deeper understanding of the farmers’ perspective. Three Journey maps are created out of which one journey isused to identify the pain points in the growing process. The insights generated from the qualitative analysis are quantified to determine what the farmers’ daily activities look like, and their challenges during the growing process. On the basis of these insights, two concepts are created to offer solutions to improve the farmer’s experience. User tests determine that the solutions were desirable but should be quantified to check the validity. The research questions and future work are discussed further.

Have You Ever Had Broken Heart? is a collection of essays that interrogate memory, loss, and grief through the intersection of personal narrative, films, the actress Frances Farmer, and woman saints and mystics from the twelfth through seventeenth centuries who were punished for daring to speak to G-d. The essays engage with autotheory and include a myriad of forms, such as segmented, one sentence, and hybrid works. The films discussed range from the philosophical, such as Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (1963), to Graeme Clifford's biopic, Frances (1982), to catechize the grief of the persona losing her mother and sister to a hit and run car wreck in June 2022. The persona traverses the realm of the mystics and saints, including Marguerite Porete, Sor Juana Inez De La Cruz, and Joan of Arc, examining their respective quests to experience the unseen and often silent divine, while questioning her longing for G-d, and simultaneously believing G-d cannot exist. Yet, within this confusion, she finds herself immersed in memories which carry the presence of her mother's love.

Since the 1979 World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (WCARRD) and the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment Development, international agricultural development organizations have been urged to strengthen their focus toward the sustainable development of the small-scale, resource poor farmer. A recent report from the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO, 1996) indicated that many small-scale farmers were not being reached by agricultural extension, although approximately 75% of the worlds' farmers are small-scale, resource poor farmers. The report suggested that in some instances agricultural extension services reported reaching one out of three farmers in Africa. In other areas such as the Near East, the report stated that one out of seven farmers had been reached by the extension services. This study investigated the small-scale, resource poor farmer's ongoing level of participation, rate of adoption of agricultural technology, and the sustainable benefits of the implemented projects within the documents of several international agricultural development organizations to determine if the farmers can positively impact the forecasted food shortage expected during the early part of the 21st Century. To accomplish this, the methodology utilized the Light and Pillemer (1984) method of exploratory literature review. The Light and Pillemer method provided the foundation for data collection as well as numerical and narrative document analysis. Data collection: Eleven key governmental and non-governmental international agricultural development organizations were contacted by the researcher and supplied the following types of documents: (1) unpublished completed projects reports, (2) unpublished annual reports, and (3) published news reports. A planned systematic investigation of the documents was carried out (Girden, 1996). Numerical and Narrative Document Analysis: Both numerical and narrative data were collected from the documents. The Light and Pillemer (1984) method was used to determine the level of overall project change in those documents which provided numerical or quantitative data. Meta ethnography and the QSR NUD.ist computer software (Qualitative Solutions and Research Pty. Ltd., 1996) were used to investigate themes and characteristics of the narrative data within the documents. The findings of the study were placed in matrices which provided a systematic examination of the characteristics of the implemented projects of 51 international agricultural development organizations located within 38 developing countries. The narrative document analysis indicated the participation of the smal-lscale, resource poor farmers. The characteristic indicators of farmer participation were farmer participation in: farmers groups, select groups, community development, and in capacity building methods such as training, leadership development, and planning and decision making. The findings of the study suggest that though many international agricultural development organizations claim that they are making some progress there remains a grave need for international agricultural research and extension to provide more documentation of project outcomes especially those outcome which are concerned with more than 75% of the worlds' farmers, the small-scale, resource poor farmer. For example, of the study’s 51 projects, only six reported small-scale, resource poor farmers participation percentage. Seven projects reported numerical data on before and after rate of adoption of the technology. Sixteen of the 51 projects reported numerical data on sustainable benefits of the project to the small-scale, resource poor farmer. Only one document reported data on both the adoption of technology and sustainable benefits to the small-scale, resource poor farmer. However, in light of the world impacting Plan of Actions (i.e. 1979 World Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development held in Rome, Italy; 1991 Plan of Action for Peoples’ Participation report of the Twenty-sixth Session held in Rome, Italy; 1992 Agenda 21 document a product of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Brazil; and the 1996 Plan of Action for Global Partnership in Agricultural Research held in Washington, D.C.) all of the documents should have indicated this type of essential data, and should be striving for a development which would be both productive and sustainable to the farmer. The results of this study suggested that the impending need for improved global food production as we move into the 21st century through the more than one million small-scale, resource poor farmer participants within the projects of this study may not be met due to the low amount of evidence in the implemented project reports of adoption of the technology, and the inadequate reporting of benefits essential to the small-scale, resource poor farmer. / Ph. D.

On-farm apprenticeships are gaining momentum as an important strategy for beginning farmer training. They are also a space for identity work and rehearsal of alternative agrifood movement practice (AAMs; MacAuley and Niewolny, 2016; Pilgeram, 2011). AAMs embody and recursively construct values of biophysical sustainability, food quality, egalitarianism, and agrarianism (Constance, Renard, and Rivera-Ferre; 2014). However, AAMs have been critiqued for disproportionately representing upper- to middle-class white cultural norms (Allen, 2004; Guthman, 2008a; Slocum, 2007), for romanticized agrarian ideology (Carlisle, 2013), and for mechanisms reproductive of neoliberalism, which buttresses the dominant agrifood system (Guthman, 2008b). These AAM discourse elements are expressed in on-farm apprenticeships. On-farm apprenticeships are variably understood as beginning farmer training (Hamilton, 2011), as inexpensive farm labor (MacAuley and Niewolny, 2016; Pilgeram, 2011), and as sites of tension between economic and non-economic attributes (Ekers, Levkoe, Walker, and Dale, 2016). I illuminate these dynamics within on-farm apprenticeships through the complementary theoretical lenses of cultural historical activity theory (Engeström, 1999), cognitive praxis (Eyerman and Jamison, 1991), and cultural identity theory (Hall, 1996). I employ critical ethnographic case study methodology to explore issues of power, social reproduction, and equity. I conducted 53 days of participant observation, worked alongside 19 apprentices on six farms for 37 days, conducted interviews (n=25), and completed a document analysis (n=407). I observed white spaces and class-based work values re/produced, mediated by AAM discourse. Furthermore, I observed three distinct objectives within the activity system: beginning farmer training, inexpensive labor for farms, and an authentic farm lifestyle experience. In contrast to the first two, this third objective, the authentic lifestyle, resists market-based logics. Instead, logics that did govern behavior include membership in a movement; an ascetic bent; the valorization of farmers and the authentic farm lifestyle; alignment with clean, healthy, and dirty parts of the job; and communitarianism. These logics point towards the creation of a third type of nonmarket/quasimarket space (Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy, 2013). I describe several considerations for on-farm apprenticeship to lead to greater equity, reproduction of viable small farm labor models, and stabilized and legitimate nonmarket understandings of what makes on-farm apprenticeship function. / Ph. D.

The average age of principal farm operators rose from 50.3 years in 1978, to 57.1 years in 2007, as farmers retire and new farmers do not enter farming (NASS, 2013).With declining numbers of entrants into farming, agricultural educators and service providers must better understand strategies for effectively preparing beginning farmers. On-farm apprenticeships in the U.S. show promise as a means to prepare farmers and are increasing in number (Niewolny and Lillard, 2010). Lave (1988) writes 'knowledge-in-practice, constituted in the settings of practice, is the locus of the most powerful knowledgeability of people in the lived-in world' (p. 14). Thus, farming, as a complex set of interwoven skills, is best learned in situ, as situated learning. On-farm apprenticeships therefore may allow learners to construct knowledge in context, and build identities as farmers. In this thesis, I share findings from a mixed methods study that explored what kinds of on-farm apprenticeships are available, and to whom; and important educational practices, structures, and institutions that support on-farm apprenticeship learning. This study comprises data from a survey (N=45) of Virginia farmers who host apprentices, and interviews (N=12) with farmers and on-farm apprentices. Findings describe who undertakes on-farm apprenticeships, and suggest that apprentices develop expert identities through situated learning with farmers. Findings describe how farmers participate as educators, and how farms function as sites of situated learning. This study also found that on-farm apprenticeships are embedded within alternative food movements, with social reproduction potentially occurring. I also explore broader implications for preparing beginning farmers. / Master of Science in Life Sciences

As generations have moved away from the farm, the population has become less aware of the practices behind the agriculture industry. However, people are becoming interested in how their food is produced. Since most of the population has not received an agriculture education, they look towards social media as their source of information. Social media has become a platform for sharing opinions and knowledge on certain topics. It has also been studied the perceptions of others can be influenced by emotionalizing and repeating stories related to the topic. Farmers and ranchers are now sharing their knowledge and experiences regarding agriculture through the convenience of social media. This leaves the question can a farmer’s use of social media influence a change in the public opinion of agriculture to a positive one. Therefore, this study focuses on the potential influence and impact farm-fluencers have on public perceptions of agriculture, through using social media.