A farm stay is now as likely to involve homemade ready-meals and hot tubs as it is hands-on farm activities.
While the entire food chain is important and is also influenced by consumption patterns, this paper will focus mainly on the farm end of the chain, touching on consumers and the wider food chain only in so far as they influence on-farm activity.
Qualitative and quantitative results support a conclusion of significant heterogeneity in farm response, and highlight tensions between maintaining a focus towards current on-farm activity or pursuing entrepreneurial diversification, as well as differing levels of technology adoption in support of these income streams.
These studies have also found that rural households with the ability to diversify their income sources to other non-farm activities tend to perform better economically than those that depend wholly on farm activities or those that take up non-farm activities as a coping strategy.
The results identify four simultaneous processes that produce the diversity in forms of agriculture between farms: structural changes, loss of farmland to urban expansion, specialisation of on-farm activities and a niching trend of on-farm activities.
Correspondingly, 52.2% of the households have been engaged in non-farm income generating activities while 47.79% concentrated only on on-farm activities.
It is encouraging that farmers are themselves developing systems to optimise trade-offs between on-farm activities and ecosystem service benefits.
Family members are engaged in on-farm activities including clearing, sowing, weeding and harvesting of these crops during the growing season when demand for alternative labor sources are high in farming communities.
All the emissions related to on-farm activities (forage production, fuel and electricity consumptions, manure and livestock management), off-farm activities (production of fertilizers, pesticides, bedding materials, purchased forages, concentrate feed, replacement animals, electricity, fuel) and transportation were considered.
As the study evaluates the impact of participation in off-farm activities on the TE of maize producers, the study indicates the relationship between off-farm and on-farm activities and indicates whether there exists trade-off or complementarity between the two income-generating activities.
The new approach, named the Decomposition and Distributed Computing DDCC) approach, first decomposes the model into two separate optimization sub-problems: a production problem, focusing on on-farm activities such as harvesting, and a provision problem, incorporating the post-production activities such as transportation logistics.
