The Viability and Potential of Smallholder Sweet Potato Enterprises as a Food Security Measure in Rural Communities of South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Agricultural Research Council in partnership with the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform are engaged in promoting the establishment of sustainable Sweet Potato Enterprise projects in South Africa. This study sought to investigate the viability of smallholder sweet potato enterprises for the South African rural communities. Formal market surveys and Gross margin analysis were utilised in addressing the research questions. Results of the study indicate that both the sweet potato vine nurseries and growers stand a significant chance to gain considerable amount of income from sweet potato enterprises. Sweet potato vines had a gross margin of between R219,000.00 and R226,000.00 while the sweet potatoes attracted an average gross margin of R47,000.00/ha. Coupled with the potential to create employment and provide access to the nutritious sweet potato cultivars, sweet potato enterprises can potentially improve food security among the rural poor in South Africa, indirectly extending benefits even to those who are not directly involved in production. This study recommends support of smallholder farmers through training and infrastructure development, as well as creation of awareness among rural people of the benefits of sweet potatoes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".