66 The Global Food System
the range in farm size is quite narrow and there is no correlation between rice area
(or commercial rice sale) and insect control practices. On the other hand, it may
be argued that the FFS addressed a rural elite (those with irrigated land), and rice
sales contributed an average of 43 per cent of cash income for farmers in the sam-
ple.
There is also some evidence that LEIT allowed participants to expand their
commercial farming. This is particularly true in Honduras, where it appears that
specific practices such as in-row tillage (as well as the experience of participating in
local technology testing and generation) were a stimulus for some farmers to begin
commercial vegetable cultivation. In the high potential zone in Kenya, the option
of growing grass strips for erosion control was made more attractive because of a
concomitant promotion of zero grazing; farmers could harvest the Napier grass for
their own cattle or sell it to neighbours.
The limited literature on the adoption of LEIT tends to reach similar conclu-
sions. The use of a cover crop in northern Honduras was associated with farmers
who grow larger amounts of maize and are more commercially oriented (Neill and
Lee, 2001). A study of farming practices in an area of western Kenya showed that
wealthier households are more likely to use low-input soil management techniques
(fallows, compost, terraces) as well as external inputs (hybrid maize, inorganic
fertilizer) (Crowley and Carter, 2000). The initial experience with the System of
Rice Intensification (SRI) in Madagascar indicates that adopters are more likely to
be surplus rather than deficit rice producers, with more land and often with better
off-farm sources of income (Moser and Barrett, 2003).
The issue of off-farm income is important. Off-farm opportunities can pro-
vide extra cash to invest in agriculture or may offer alternatives to a moribund
agricultural economy. In the high potential zone in Kenya, there was a negative
correlation between income from business or petty trade and the uptake of conser-
vation technologies. In Sri Lanka, in contrast, farmers who earned a higher pro-
portion of their incomes from salaries or trade were as likely to be interested in
IPM as those whose income was predominantly from agriculture. Possible expla-
nations for the difference between the cases include the feasibility of balancing the
various income-generating activities (e.g. petty trade in the Kenya case may keep
the farmer away from the field) and perceptions of the profitability of investing in
agriculture.
However, when a household’s off-farm income opportunities are confined to
casual labour there is less room for manoeuvre. In Honduras, most farmers were
engaged in some off-farm labour, but those farmers in the lowest resource wealth
category had the highest dependence on off-farm income and the lowest use of
LEIT (or mineral fertilizer). In Sri Lanka, although there was fairly broad interest
in the FFS, those farmers who also worked as casual labour were significantly less
likely to participate (and used more insecticide than anyone else). Crowley and
Carter (2000) describe the downward spiral of unskilled rural migrants from west-
ern Kenya who have too little time or cash to invest in the improvement of their
own farms and end up working for others or migrating in search of employment.