Adoption and Dis-Adoption of Sustainable Agriculture: A Case of Farmers’ Innovations and Integrated Fruit Fly Management in Kenya
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This is a case study on agricultural adoption in a specific area. Although it focuses on a specific locality the work is interesting and the authors considered many relevant parameters.
However, this paper is poorly written and the authors could not describe the results and discussed them properly. I suggest rewrite the results and discussion in a way so that readers can easily understand.
The Figures are not professional. Please follow standard style and format. Avoid gridlines and do not add values on graphs.
The discussion should be written in a separate section, not in the same section as the result.
The conclusion is too long. Please concise it.
This paper can be resubmitted after suggested revisions.
Author Response
Reviewer 1
This is a case study on agricultural adoption in a specific area. Although it focuses on a specific locality the work is interesting and the authors considered many relevant parameters. However, this paper is poorly written and the authors could not describe the results and discussed them properly.
Point 1: I suggest rewrite the results and discussion in a way so that readers can easily understand.
Response 1: Thank you for your review. We have thoroughly read through the paper and extensively edited and improved it. We have also separated the results and discussion as recommended.
Point 2: The Figures are not professional. Please follow standard style and format. Avoid gridlines and do not add values on graphs.
Response 2: Thank you for this observation. We have reformatted the figures using standard style and format.
Point 3: The conclusion is too long. Please concise it.
Response 3: Thank you for this concern. We have improved the conclusion as recommended.
Reviewer 2 Report
This is an interesting study on adoption vs. dis-adoption of IPM strategies by farmers to control the invasive fruit fly Bactrocera dorsalis in Kenya. The results the authors received have important applications for extension area and developing effective educational programs to increase farmer's awareness of benefits from using IPM methods. The authors proposed and implemented an interesting (and quite rarely utilized for this topic) statistical approach for investigating farmers' knowledge and readiness to employ IPM technologies.
Overall the manuscript is very well-written and organized; all the figures and tables are well prepared. The authors provided the detailed introduction to the topic and its discussion; the experiments are well designed, thoroughly conducted and well described.
I have a few comments for the authors to consider (see below) which would make the study easier to follow:
1. I suggest to split the results and the discussion into two separate sections.
2. For the discussion, I suggest splitting it further into few paragraphs and adding subheadings to clear state findings, the authors' arguments and future directions.
Author Response
Reviewer 2
This is an interesting study on adoption vs. dis-adoption of IPM strategies by farmers to control the invasive fruit fly Bactrocera dorsalis in Kenya. The results the authors received have important applications for extension area and developing effective educational programs to increase farmer's awareness of benefits from using IPM methods. The authors proposed and implemented an interesting (and quite rarely utilized for this topic) statistical approach for investigating farmers' knowledge and readiness to employ IPM technologies. Overall, the manuscript is very well-written and organized; all the figures and tables are well prepared. The authors provided the detailed introduction to the topic and its discussion; the experiments are well designed, thoroughly conducted and well described
Point 1: I suggest to split the results and the discussion into two separate sections.
Response 2: Thank you for the positive response and the suggestion. We have split the results from discussions and hope the paper has improved.
Point 2: For the discussion, I suggest splitting it further into few paragraphs and adding subheadings to clearly state findings, the authors' arguments and future directions.
Response 2: Thank you for this suggestion, we have incorporated the recommendation and hope it reads better.
Reviewer 3 Report
Adoption and Dis-Adoption of Sustainable Agriculture: A Case of Farmers’ Innovations and Integrated Fruit Fly Management in Kenya by Wangith et al. describes the use different components of IPM by the farmers of Embu county, Kenya. This is an important study as IPM adoption leads to decrease in the pest management cost as well as sustained pest control with additional benefit of resistance management and decreased environmental contamination. This identifies different motivational factors such as Government support (as concluded in this study) to encourage farmers to implement IPM in managing the fruit fly. The study is well conducted and nicely written. I approve this study for publication after major queries regarding the data collection methods are answered.
Major queries
- The average farmer age is on high side, is there a biased in the data collection method or some other artefact? Providing age range with average age would be helpful.
- Continuing with the first query, with average age of the famer nearing 60 years the experience in mango cultivation is only around 15 year, why farmers are adopting mango cultivation so late? Discussing this will be helpful to the readers and may be helpful to target a specific age of farmers to teach/nudge towards IPM.
- There is a chance that a farmer with large mango farm may be using a non-pesticide method of pest control in small portion of his farm and it may give a false impression of adoption of IPM as the farm size increases. Which in turn can overinflate the adoption of non-pesticide control method in large farm settings as the answer to the question is yes or no. Is it possible to know if the farmer is using non-pesticide methods in all of the orchard and use a threshold such as use of non-pesticide method in atleast half of the mango cultivated area to understand the correlation between the adoption of IPM and farm size.
Major suggestion
- Figure 1. Map is missing from the manuscript
- Please provide the details of different methods such as “augmentorium”, “orchard sanitation” and other methods mentioned in the study
Minor suggestions:
- Please provide the scientific name of mango.
- Use lower case “a” in Anisopliae
- Remove dot (.) after USD.
- Figure 1. Map is missing from the manuscript
- Provide scientific names of neem, Mexican marigold, pepper, aloe vera and other plants mentioned I the study.
Author Response
Reviewer 3
Adoption and Dis-Adoption of Sustainable Agriculture: A Case of Farmers’ Innovations and Integrated Fruit Fly Management in Kenya by Wangithi et al. describes the use different components of IPM by the farmers of Embu county, Kenya. This is an important study as IPM adoption leads to decrease in the pest management cost as well as sustained pest control with additional benefit of resistance management and decreased environmental contamination. This identifies different motivational factors such as Government support (as concluded in this study) to encourage farmers to implement IPM in managing the fruit fly. The study is well conducted and nicely written. I approve this study for publication after major queries regarding the data collection methods are answered.
Point 1: The average farmer age is on high side, is there a biased in the data collection method or some other artefact? Providing age range with average age would be helpful.
Response 1: Thank you for the positive response and the suggestions. The data was collected from a randomly selected sample and therefore unbiased. On the age of farmers being on the high side, this is a common observation across African rural settings where the farming community has been found to be aging. Similar age averages have also been observed in related studies among mango growers in Kenya and Ethiopia (see e.g., Muriithi et al., 2020; Midingoyi et al., 2018; Korir et at., 2015)
Point 2: Continuing with the first query, with average age of the famer nearing 60 years the experience in mango cultivation is only around 15 year, why farmers are adopting mango cultivation so late? Discussing this will be helpful to the readers and may be helpful to target a specific age of farmers to teach/nudge towards IPM.
Response 2: Thank you for this observation. Mango is a fruit tree cultivated as a cash crop with ownership mainly by the household heads who manage the orchards till their old age. The trees are then transferred from parents to their children through land inheritance/ sub-division. Our question on experience ignores the period the respondent/household did not have user rights to the trees, but rather focuses on the period during which the household could make independent decisions regarding the trees, which could possibly be only after inheriting the land. In most of our project sites, this does not happen till the old age of the parents and hence the observation that you made.
Point 3: There is a chance that a farmer with large mango farm may be using a non-pesticide method of pest control in small portion of his farm and it may give a false impression of adoption of IPM as the farm size increases. Which in turn can overinflate the adoption of non-pesticide control method in large farm settings as the answer to the question is yes or no. Is it possible to know if the farmer is using non-pesticide methods in all of the orchard and use a threshold such as use of non-pesticide method in at least half of the mango cultivated area to understand the correlation between the adoption of IPM and farm size?
Response 3: Thank you for this interesting observation. Yes, there is a possibility that farmers can adopt the non-pesticide methods partially. However, besides the Yes and No response to using the methods, we asked the extent of application (partial/full) and all farmers confirmed full application. Further questions such as the number of traps per orchard and the placement location were also asked to validate if the farmers used non-pesticide control strategies selectively/partially. Almost all of them correctly used the recommended rates of application (i.e. 1 trap for 15-20 trees), and evenly placed the traps within the orchards.
Point 4: Figure 1. Map is missing from the manuscript
Response 4: Thank you for this concern. We confirm that the map was included in the paper, probably an error occurred while formatting or downloading it. We have alerted the editor about it.
Point 5: Please provide the details of different methods such as “augmentorium”, “orchard sanitation” and other methods mentioned in the study
Response 5: Thank you for this suggestion, however, we deliberately left the explanation, due to space limitation, of the different IPM components and instead provided references of our previous work where they have been explained in detail. For instance, see the extract in the attached document from one of the references
Point 6: Please provide the scientific name of mango.
Response 6: Thank you for this suggestion, we have provided.
Point 7: Use lower case “a” in Anisopliae
Response 7: This was an oversight; thank you for the correction
Point 8: Remove dot (.) after USD.
Response 8: Thank you for this correction, we have rectified all through the texts and other errors.
Point 9: Provide scientific names of neem, Mexican marigold, pepper, aloe vera and other plants mentioned in the study.
Response 9: Thank you for this suggestion. We agree and have included the scientific names.
References
- Midingoyi, S.G.; Kassie, M.; Muriithi, B.; Diiro, G.; Ekesi, S. Do Farmers and the Environment Benefit from Adopting Integrated Pest Management Practices? Evidence from Kenya. Agric. Econ. 2019.
- Muriithi, B.W.; Affognon, H.D.; Diiro, G.M.; Kingori, S.W.; Tanga, C.M.; Nderitu, P.W.; Mohamed, S.A.; Ekesi, S. Impact assessment of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) strategy for suppression of mango-infesting fruit flies in Kenya. Crop Prot. 2016, 81, 20–29.
- Kibira, M.; Affognon, H.; Njehia, B.; Muriithi, B.; Ekesi, S. Economic Evaluation of Integrated Management of Fruit Fly in Mango Production in Embu County, Kenya. J. Agric. Resour. Manag. 2015, 10, 343–353
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors revised the manuscript as per my comments.
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors have made the suggested changes and have responded to my queries to my satisfaction. I recommend the manuscript, "Adoption and Dis-Adoption of Sustainable Agriculture: A Case of Farmers’ Innovations and Integrated Fruit Fly Management in Kenya" by Wangith for publication.
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
201027_Agriculture_FruitFlyKenya
This research evaluated farmer knowledge of and motivation for adopting Integrated Pest Management (IPM) for fruit fly management in mangoes in Kenya.
General: English is very good. Some editing may be helpful for minor revisions like oxford commas and occasional wordsmithing. Some capitalization should be changed, e.g., the abbreviation ICIPE; Metarhizium anisopliae. Data is a plural word.
Introduction: Very good presentation of background information and prior research. The case is well-made for the need to study and improve management of B. dorsalis (BD). Good discussion of the need to consider IPM on a scale rather than a binary yes/no threshold.
Materials and methods:
“The adoption/non-adoption decision is dichotomous…” is this true? Is there not a gradient of IPM adoption? I would like to see some recognition / discussion of this. This seems to be fundamental to the research conducted, but needs to be better explained as to why this yes/no standard was assumed for the study. Further discussion of the paper will assume that this is a valid preconception, but that case still needs to be made. However, the concept of modeling dis-adoption appears to be novel and is a strength of the model used.
I am not an expert on modeling, but the explanation of the model used in the paper does appear valid.
“Although the fruit fly IPM comprises five different components, as mentioned in the introduction section, the use of Fruit fly traps(MAT)was used in this study as the proxy for fruit fly IPM adoption, as this is the most common and commercialized component of the IPM strategy”. This is a good way to address my concerns listed above re: oversimplification of IPM gradient. However, it is important to discuss how use of traps is an appropriate proxy for IPM adoption and to not overstate conclusions based on t5his one practice.
Table 1: does -/+ mean that the expected sign is inconclusive? Please define in a table footnote.
- 6, “…Those who were using fruit fly traps during the survey were categorized as fruit fly IPM adopters, those who had never used any of the fruit fly IPM components as non-adopters…” Could someone use IPM practices without using traps? Again, this decision to oversimplify into a two-way dichotomy should be defended / explained. For example, “…Among those who had stopped usingfruit fly traps, the majority cited unavailability of the product in the market…” suggests that some farmers may be IPM adopters but are constrained from purchasing the products that the dichotomous IPM designation is based on. Does that make them not IPM users? What if they use other practices, like sanitation?
- 7: “All the sampled mango correctly identified…” this does not make sense. All the respondents? All the mango farmers?
Figure 2: were fruit evaluations conducted? Why not?
Figure 3: some misspellings: Prunning, Burrying, Augmentorioum. More detail should be included in the legend.
- 8: “…recommended timing for setting up the fruit fly traps is two months to fruit harvesting…” How does this compare to ripening / maturing?
Table 2: define “knowledge score” and “practice score”
- 9: “Out of the sampled households, 35% were using one or more indigenous methods for the management of the mango fruit flies…” is there empirical evidence of the effectiveness of these practices?
Figure 4: are these practices mutually-exclusive?
Tables 3&4: are the Pseudo R2 high enough to draw robust conclusions?
Table 3: define dy/dx. “gender of the household” aren’t most households mixed-gender? Do you mean “household head”?...ok, explained in the sentence after the table, but that should be included in the row heading.
“More elderly farmers were willing to adopt IPM than their younger counterparts and this consistent with[45, 56]…” Say what 45, 56 refer to in the text.
“This implies that, even though knowledge on different strategies was associated with positive adoption of IPM, the use of own farmers’ innovation discouraged the adoption of IPM.” Explain this more. Remembering that IPM adoption is defined at the use of traps, then we are really correlating indigenous practices, e.g., smoking with herbs, food bait in pesticide, plant based pesticides, with whether or not traps are used.
- 12 “…Although the importance of social networks in the adoption of agricultural technologies is overemphasized in the previous studies…” How so?
- 13 “…We can therefore explain that IPM and farmers’ innovations could work complementarily to manage the mango fruit fly.” Exactly. Replace “IPM” with “use traps” and you highlight the gradient of IPM practice that I have been discussing. Traps, pesticides, and indigenous practices are not mutually-exclusive.
“The majority (90%) of survey respondents used synthetic insecticides as the main method for the management o ffruit flies. “
“…However, most (82%) survey respondents perceived IPM to be more effective in the management of fruit flies compared to the use of synthetic pesticides(75%)…”
^ “The results reveal the use of synthetic pesticides as the major fruit fly management practice, despite the assiduous promotion effort by icipe and partners in the IPM in this region.”
Have these partners quantified the effectiveness of non-pesticide practices? Is the use of trapping mutually exclusive from pesticide use?
Did not sort through bibliography, but generally looks good.
Reviewer 2 Report
The survey area is too small to support the conclusion, and the content of the manuscript is too simple.
The current manuscript doesn't suitable for publishing in this journal.
Reviewer 3 Report
In this paper the authors analyzed and factors affecting the adoption of fruit fly management in a specific area of Kenya.
Although the study is interesting the authors failed to relate the required parameters with the innovative approaches.
The results are poorly discussed. the authors were mostly focussed on describing the methodology.
Most of the parameters are basic demographic observation and very common in social scirnce research. However, there are a few parameters that are new and closely associated with the hypothesis.
Overall, the implication of this research is very narrow and only of local importance.
It is not well written and there are many linguistic and formatting issyes.
Figures are not professional.
Aparantly it seems it is a concise version of the report or a thesis but need proper attention towards making a good standard journal articles.
