Information Resources

As part of their research process, Horticulture Innovation Lab partners create fact sheets, presentations, posters, journal articles, and other information products to share with farmers, academics, and other participants in their projects. These horticulture resources are sorted by country, value chain part, type of information, crop, and other category tags. We hope you find these information products useful in your work with fruits, vegetables, and farmers.

Journal Article: Postharvest technologies for small-scale farmers in low- and middle-income countries; a call to action

This paper presents several innovations in postharvest management introduced in LMICs that have made impacts; however, more comprehensive and systemic impacts are required. For example, we focused on smallholder farmers, but medium-sized operations in LMICs, along with the formation of cooperatives or associations among smallholder farmers, can be conduits for adopting technologies with higher capital costs. Ultimately, greater cohesion and urgency is needed among policymakers, researchers, private industry, sociologists, agro-economists, public sector, local-leaders, among others, to meet this call to action to finally make significant reductions in postharvest losses in LMICs.

Journal Article: The Influence of Food Environments on Food Security Resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Examination of Urban and Rural Difference in Kenya

This study used a two-part telephonic study comprising of the C-SCAN and HFIAS survey tools and was conducted in urban and rural Kenya. This study aimed to examine urban and rural differences in the perceived influence of COVID-19 on (1) agricultural production and livelihood; and (2) food environment attributes (food access, accessibility, price) and diets. Furthermore, this paper examined whether access to different environments (e.g., wild, cultivated, informal, and formal) impacted food security. We hypothesize that during the COVID-19 pandemic, urban residents will report decreased access to both the natural and built food environment negatively influencing food security.
Country: Kenya