Climbing Legumes: An Underutilized Resource With Significant Potential to Intensify Farming on Terrace Walls (FTW) for Smallholder Farmers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Millions of subsistence farmers cultivate crops on terraces. These farmers face unique challenges including severe shortages of arable land and remoteness leading to poor access to inputs including nitrogen fertilizer. These challenges contribute to human and livestock malnutrition. Terrace walls (risers) as a vertical surface to grow climbing or trailing legumes represents an opportunity to help overcome these challenges. These crops are rich in minerals and protein, and their associated microbes produce nitrogen fertilizer. Rice bean is already grown on terrace risers in South Asia. This paper reviews the literature concerning crops that are currently farmed on terrace walls (FTW), then surveys climbing legume species that have potential for FTW, focusing on crops that are nutritious and tolerate shade (caused by the terrace wall) and resist drought (many terrace farms experience an extended dry season). A total of 29 legume species are discussed including climbing varieties of jack bean, common bean, cowpea, winged bean, horse gram and velvet bean. The review concludes by discussing the practical challenges of farmer adoption of FTW and makes concrete recommendations. Terrace wall cultivation of legumes represents an opportunity to intensify agriculture and increase resiliency in remote mountainous areas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".