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In the climate-development interface, research for development gained a strong interest in climate-smart agriculture and sustainable forms of intensification. Moreover, the urgency to respond to climate change stimulates a strong and sometimes exclusive focus on mitigation, driven by research-based agricultural practices. In the livestock sector, this materialises in strategies to lower emissions from livestock, which centralises the adoption question: what can we do to stimulate the use of best practices by smallholder farmers? This paper flags the risk that this outlook may overlooksmallholder farmers' capacities to navigate sub-optimal conditions of drought or scarcity. The paper applies an alternative lens for understanding 'agriculture-as-performance' and highlights smallholder cattle owners' agency and resourcefulness. It aims to create a conceptual space to examine how adaptive capacities are grounded in the rhythms of agriculture under suboptimal conditions. Empirically, the study focuses on the cattle-feeding practices of five farming households evolving through seasons and lifetimes in a sedentary agricultural system in Kenya. Our frame identifies diverse affordances, conceptualised as opportunities for actions, emerging and disappearing in the immediate material environment, and we portray cattle feeding as a networked response anchored in practices of giving, sharing, and receiving. We use our insights into the dynamics and performance of entangled socio-technical practices to sketch the contours of an alternative pathway for agriculture for development. We argue in favour of a shift from an exclusive focus on the adoption of predefined optimal solutions to a diagnostic and catalytic approach integrating situated adaptive performances through which farming households respond to action opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smallholder agricultural commercialization is a central objective across Africa, one linked to poverty reduction, sectoral transformation and increasingly, climate resilience and adaptation. There is much attention given to the extent to which agricultural commercialization serves to reduce poverty, but less to the commercialization pathways that lead towards or away from that outcome. There are, likewise, many studies that project hugely adverse future impacts of climate change on commercial agricultural production, but surprisingly little empirical work on how climate impacts are affecting current agricultural commercialization prospects and pathways for smallholder farmers. This paper, therefore, offers an analysis of levels of climate vulnerability and resilience within existing commercialization pathways in Tanzania and Zimbabwe. It embeds the account within an analysis of the underlying causes of uneven distributions of vulnerability and resilience. We find that while being able to practise commercially viable agriculture can contribute to resilience, it does not do so for the people who most need commercialization to reduce poverty. It is more common for farmers to face what we term an adaptation trap. We conclude by considering what these cases add to our understanding of climate-smart agriculture (CSA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is one of the most significant challenges many rural farmers face in sub-Saharan Africa, as most agricultural practices are rainfed dependent. Many of these rural farmers are small-scale farmers with limited access to financial assets, agricultural equipment, and inputs. With a rapidly changing climate and limited access to agricultural resources, many rural farmers in Zimbabwe have found it extremely difficult to engage in meaningful crop production activities and secure their livelihoods and incomes. This paper employs participatory research methods to examine adaptive strategies adopted by rural farmers. The strategies include optimal water resource utilisation, early maturing seed adoption, soil and water conservation (SWM), and nutrient management techniques (NMT). Cost-effective integration of labour and post-harvest storage facilities is also considered. Rural farmers, despite constraints, actively engage in these adaptive practices. The study assesses the effectiveness of initiatives to enhance crop production and build resilience against climate variability. Discussion centers on the comprehensiveness of these adaptive techniques within the broader framework of sustainable development goals, focusing on goals 1 (No Poverty) and 2 (Zero Hunger). The findings contribute to understanding and promoting resilience among vulnerable households facing climate-related challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]