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The UN General Assembly declared 2014 to be the International Year of Family Farming and invited the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to facilitate implementation of the International Year, in collaboration with its partners.

Among its other initiatives for the International Year, FAO has worked with the Global Forum on Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS) in setting the spotlight on rural advisory services for family farms. This has been done by jointly organizing two recent side events on the topic – in Buenos Aires on 26 September 2014 during the 5th GFRAS Annual Meeting and in Rome on 27 October 2014 during the Global...

The Moderator's Summary (130 KB) of the FAO e-mail conference on “Approaches and methodologies in ex post impact assessment of agricultural research: Experiences, lessons learned and perspectives” was published in September 2014, providing an easily readable synthesis of the main discussion points and conclusions.

Over 600 people subscribed to this 4-week long conference, which ran from 5 May to 1 June 2014. They posted 109 messages which came from people living in 38 different countries - 58% were posted by people living in developing countries. Most discussions focused on issues related to micro-level impact assessment (typically looking at the impacts of...

FAO and the European Union have teamed up with the government of Swaziland to help over 20,000 smallholder farmers to increase the production of higher-quality food and improve their linkages with new markets. Set up in 2009, the Swaziland Agricultural Development Project (SADP) is a 5-year programme (now entering in its finale phase) with over €14 million in funding from the EU and almost € 350 000 from FAO. The project has played a key role in revitalizing agriculture in a country of 1.2 million, where over 75% of the population is employed in subsistence farming.

The main objective of SADP is to...

The FAO Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean has been working in support of family farming with its member countries, forming a network of experts with over a hundred participants from 33 countries in the region. This book systematizes experiences and lessons to contribute to the dialogue and formulation of public policies to address the challenges faced by family farmers, highlighting experiences and projects that strengthened the management of their organizations, the sustainable intensification of production and the access to markets and value chains. (In Spanish)

Over 600 people subscribed to this 4-week long conference, which finished on 1 June 2014. They posted 109 messages which came from people living in 38 different countries - 58% were posted by people living in developing countries. Most discussions focused on issues related to micro-level impact assessment (typically looking at the impacts of a specific research project in one part of a country) rather than macro-level impact assessment (typically looking at the impacts of investments in agricultural research, or one of its sectors, at the national level).

The Research and Extension Unit provided key inputs in the researching and writing of the State of Food and Agriculture 2014. The report analyses family farms and the role of innovation in ensuring global food security, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability. It argues that family farms must be supported to innovate in ways that promote sustainable intensification of production and improvement in rural livelihoods.

The materials covered in this collection have been prepared for use by all service providers concerned with promoting farming as a business – whether they work for the private, NGO, or public sector. This could include the public sector extension workers who are involved in farm business management and marketing, private sector business service providers, NGOs and policy-makers. Further, it is hoped that the material will encourage decision-makers in countries where farm management extension positions have not been established to set up such positions.

The purpose of this guide is to provide a better understanding of the concept and practice of entrepreneurship. This guide has been prepared for people who want to start a farm business for the first time and for farmers that want to make changes to their farming systems by introducing high value enterprises directed to the market. This guide can also help extension workers be better able to help farmers develop the skills and spirit of an entrepreneur. It is part of a series of booklets on farm business management designed to help extension workers support farmers.

This guide has been prepared to provide a better understanding of benchmarking in farm management extension. It explains clearly what benchmarking is, discusses what to benchmark, suggests a series of steps which may be followed and shows ways to apply these to the process in the field. It introduces the concepts of profitability and efficiency as indicators of farm business performance, examines those indicators and applies them to work in the field. The guide explains also some diagnostic techniques that can be of use to identify problems of the farm business and resulting cause and effect relationships.

This guide is intended to help extension workers better understand the concept of risk, the situations where risk occurs and management strategies that can be used to reduce, or at least soften its effect. It is hoped that the guide will be useful in assisting extension workers to provide farmers with advice on the kind of risk management strategies that they can employ to deal with risk in their day-to-day farming operations.