Topic ID No.: 2026-G05
Title of research topic:
Agricultural intensification pathways for small farms in Malawi
Description:
Small farms are a binding constraint to the livelihoods of many family farmers and often disincentivize technological change. In sub-Saharan Africa, where small farms dominate and rural transformation is unfolding rapidly, information about farm size distributions is often sparse, binned into broad classes, and aggregated at spatial scales too coarse for detailed analysis. An earlier assessment revealed that about a third (24 million) of African cultivate less than 0.5 ha and that such small farms form the backbone of Malawi's crop production systems.
This project will quantify yield gaps for maize crops in Malawian smallholder farming systems using available survey data and crop modelling. That will be used as an entry point to understand and identify agricultural intensification pathways for different farm segments in Malawi. Yield gap analysis will be complemented with farm level analysis to contextualize the field level benefits of improved agronomy for farms of different sizes. Promising crop diversification options will be evaluated for their merits to meet food security targets at household to national levels along with their potential to improve other livelihood aspects (e.g., income and nutrition) important for small farms.
Target region or country (if applicable):
Malawi
Topic background information / scientific relevance:
No thorough yield gap analysis has been conducted to date for smallholder farming systems in Malawi, hence the scope current farm yields is unknown despite the high population density in the country and chronic maize import dependency. More importantly, and although the predominance of small farms is well recognized in Malawi, it is not clear to which extent these limit agricultural intensification and the adoption of improved agronomic practices. This project will therefore speak directly to the so-called conundrum of food security in Africa, i.e., "how to provide cheap, nutritious food to feed the growing urban and rural populations while creating incentives to stimulate increased agricultural production" on-farm.
Research objectives:
1) Yield gap analysis for maize across smallholder farming systems of Malawi
2) Estimate for how many farms, and where, yield gap closure is a viable agricultural intensification pathway
3) Evaluate the livelihood merits of different crop diversification options for different farm segments
Required skills and qualifications of the applicant:
The candidate must be trained as an agronomist and be keen to learn advanced data analytical methods (crop modelling, machine learning, geospatial data analysis) to be able to handle large sets of multi-thematic data. All the work must be reproducible through coding in R and/or Python.
Contact person and institute in charge:
Jun.-Prof. Joao Vasco Silva. University of Hohenheim. Department of Plant Production in the Tropics and Subtropics.