Blackmore et al.have reported a negative influence of seasonal farming on vulnerability to poverty and food insecurity, confirming the results of this study.For non-participation in irrigation farming, the result shows a positive and significant effect on alleviating the poverty status of rural households.This is expected because farmers who do not irrigate and only practice seasonal farming are indifferent, given the fact that they rely only on rainfall and produce during raining season, thus incur no debt or investment commitments on irrigation assets.This argument is based on the assumption that there is a negligible impact of climate change affecting the production of the participants and non-participants, otherwise, both may not be comparable.Furthermore, crop diversification for participation in irrigation farming is statistically significant and have a positive effect on household welfare.This might be because households who are a participant in irrigation farming could easily diversify and as a result, become better off in terms of reduction in poverty level as well as reducing the potential of becoming poor in the subsequent years.These findings are consistent with those of Michler and Josephson, who investigated agricultural diversification on poverty dynamics.According to their results, the growing variety of crops reduces the likelihood of non-poor households becoming poor and poor households remaining poor.On the other hand, the non-participants of irrigation who practice crop diversification are more likely to experience a decrease in welfare because growing diverse crops may require irrigation support, especially given the impact of climate change.This has a negative effect on the households’ poverty vulnerability.The importance of having access to rented land on poverty reduction has been examined in Kenya by Muraoka et al..The result of this study is consistent with our findings,grow lights as there is a positive and significant effect of rented land on welfare for participants of irrigation farming.

For the non-participant in irrigation farming, access to rented land showed a negative association with household poverty levels, indicating a reduction in the poverty gap index.This could be attributed to lower transaction costs only to landowners with the exclusion of irrigation operation costs.Road access is statistically significant and positively influence household consumption per capita income, for rural household farmers who are under the irrigation participation group.This implies that farmers who have road access could easily access irrigation facilities, improve farm productivity and subsequently increase their household consumption.Access to motorable-road also resulted in poverty reduction, household vulnerability to poverty, for the irrigators.The result further shows that poverty severity could still increase despite having access to the road for non-irrigators.This could be ascribed to the fact that non-irrigators could have lesser yields for sale which may not contribute to improving welfare or reducing poverty levels.The findings are consistent with those of Bacha et al., who found that road access improves household welfare.Contact with extension agents has a significant effect on household welfare and poverty reduction.According to the findings, irrigators who have access to extension officers improves their welfare while significantly reducing their poverty gap index, poverty severity, and vulnerability to poverty.This is consistent with expectations, as non-irrigators could also benefit from learning how to improve farm productivity, potentially narrowing the poverty severity.This is consistent with the findings of Sinyolo et al. and Wossen et al., who found that access to extension services increases household consumption while decreasing poverty.The descriptive statistics of welfare and poverty outcomes presented in Table 2 shows that irrigation participants are better-off compared with the non-participants.However, these significant differences do not imply causality as the differences in the outcome variables is subject to self-selection biases.Table 5 presents the impact of participation in irrigation farming on the outcome variables using the endogenous switching estimator.The ATT and ATU were estimated after fitting the switching regression with endogenous treatment effects1.

The result suggests that there is a significant change in terms of participation in irrigation farming.The increase in food consumption expenditure per capita shows the impact of participation in irrigation farming, which also has a statistically significant impact on reducing households’ poverty gap index, poverty severity and vulnerability to poverty.The result shows that due to farmers’ participation in irrigation farming, food consumption expenditure per capita increased by 45% while non-participants would have increased their consumption per capital expenditure by 23% had they participated in irrigation farming.For the poverty gap index, participating farmers lowered their poverty gap index by 20% while non-participation in irrigation-based farming could have resulted in 5% reduction in poverty gap index, had they opted to irrigate their farms.Moreover, the ATT for participation resulted in around 22% in poverty severity and this could also have led to a reduction of 17% in poverty severity for the non-participation in irrigation farming had they chosen to participate.Lastly, vulnerability to poverty was reduced by 25% owing to participation in irrigation farming while non-participants could have reduced their poverty vulnerability by 3% had they participated in irrigation farming.Overall, the results of the ATT and ATU suggests that participation in irrigation farming contribute to improving household welfare and alleviation of poverty in the study area.In the last half century, invasive species have caused unprecedented challenges to agricultural systems globally.In sub-Saharan Africa , agriculture is considered the primary source of livelihoods for most households.However, its contribution to food security and poverty reduction is hampered by several, often interacting, biotic and abiotic factors.For instance, the recent invasion of fall army worm in SSA has become a major threat to food security in the region.The first outbreak of FAW in Africa occurred in West Africa in 2016, and to date the pest has spread to 44 countries in the continent.The FAW can cause damage to more than 80 crop species, including economically important crops such as maize, rice, sorghum, wheat, sugarcane and cotton just to mention a few.

Current estimates from 12 African countries suggest an annual loss of million tons of maize due to FAW infestations.In particular, farm-level estimates from Ghana and Zambia suggest yield losses of per cent, 47% in Kenya and 9.4% in Zimbabwe due to FAW infestations.In maize, FAW attacks all cropping stages from seedling emergence through to ear development.They defoliate and destroy young plants whereby, whorl damage can result in yield losses, and ear feeding can result in the reduction of grain quality and yields.The Management of the FAW involves the integration of several approaches, including the use of insecticides, host plant resistance, and biological control.However, all these approaches depend on several characteristics of the involved agro-ecosystems.In South America where the pest has been a challenge for quite sometime, the common management strategy has been the use of insecticide sprays and genetically modified crops like Bt maize.Due to financial challenges associated with most of African governments, alongside the cost associated with massive spraying programs of chemical insecticides and the use of genetically modified crops like Bt maize, the effective management of this pest in the continent remains a challenge.In addition, excessive use of chemical insecticides is associated with negative environmental effects and can lead to the development of pest resistance.At the backdrop of this, integrated pest management has been gaining more attention among researchers and its application is also increasing the crop yields.This approach seeks to minimize the reliance on pesticides use by emphasizing the application of biological control agents.Mass media can affect the spread and attack poised by FAW during an outbreak.Furthermore, awareness campaigns, particularly through various media outlets such as radio, newspapers, TV and so on, do not only make farmers aware of FAW outbreaks but also improve trust on IPM a nation will be advocating for.In recent times, attention to health news has been observed to play an integral role in disease management.There is no doubt that correct and relevant knowledge about maize crop and its pests is essential to farmers.The main goal of this paper is to develop a mathematical model to assess the effects of media campaigns during a FAW outbreak.Mathematical models of plant-pest interactions have provided insights into effective methods for effective pest management as well as way of increasing plant productivity.

In some of the studies,mathematical models were used to investigate the effects of biological control on the dynamics of plant pest interactions, while in other studies,led grow lights pest management models based solely on chemical controls were proposed and analyzed.For instance, Liu and Teng utilized a mathematical model to assess the impact of spraying pesticides at a fixed time on the pest reproductive cycles.Among several outcomes, their study showed that there exists an optimal time for pest control if the pesticides were to be applied just before each birth pulse of the cycle.Wei proposed pest control models that incorporated birth pulse and were based on the assumption that pesticides killed adult pests or larvae or both.Making use of numerical simulation, the study demonstrated that with the different elimination rates for larvae and adults, the corresponding optimal times for pesticide applications were also different.These studies and several others have certainly produced many useful results and improved the existing knowledge on plant-pest interaction dynamics.Despite of all these efforts, mathematical models for FAW management during an outbreak are very few and of the few that exists there are some limitations; majority of these few were general and not pest-specific, which implies that their results were also general.Practically, pests are not general, rather, they follow different biological development cycles, hence more informative plant-pest interaction models need to be pest-specific and closely follow the life cycle of the pest involved the presented models utilized integer-order differential equations which according to Caputo, do not replicate real-world problems nor capture memory effects as compared to fractional calculus.Furthermore, unlike IDEs, models based on fractional calculus have been found to be more accurate with regard to describing rules and development processes of several phenomena in natural science and this has been attributed to the fact that fractional order models possess memory effects and hereditary properties.Hence, there has been growing interest among researchers to use fractional calculus in modeling real-world problems, and some remarkable achievements have been made.Cognizant of this, a fractional order pest-plant based model has been proposed in the present study with the aim to study the effects of educational campaigns and FAW larval predation on persistence and extinction of the pest in a maize field.The model incorporates the maize biomass and two essential development stages of the FAW, that is, the larval and the moth.In addition, since FAW larvae are prey to several parasitoids, predators and pathogens like birds, rodents, beetles, earwigs, the proposed model incorporates the predator population.The rest of the paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, a fractional-order FAW model is proposed and analyzed.In particular, the model’s steady states have been computed and their stability has been investigate as well.In Section 3, we perform an optimal control study to determine the effects of farming on minimizing the effects of FAW on maize biomass, through both mathematical analysis and numerical simulation.Finally, we conclude the paper with some discussion in Section 4.In Ghana, cocoa is a major source of livelihood for smallholder farmers.The crop generates about $2 billion in foreign exchange annually and accounts for 30% of the total export earnings.Ghana plays an important role on the international cocoa market being the second largest producer of cocoa beans in the world after Ivory Coast and representing about 20% of global production.Cocoa is produced using conventional practices.Agricultural land degradation is a global problem related to land clearance, such as clear cutting and deforestation.As a response to improve soil nutrients and reduce degradation, organic farming is often considered as one option towards ecological intensification.The concern for low cocoa production in cocoa farming systems is accompanied by economic, social and environmental challenges.At the economic level, there are issues with ageing cocoa farms and low producer price of cocoa beans.The social issues include the concern for child labour in cocoa production , lack of labour for production activities and gender issues.Soil fertility, air quality, biodiversity loss , deforestation; ‘misuse’ of pesticides are among the environmental concerns.Compared to conventional cocoa production, organic farming may have the potential to profitability increases through premiums from higher added value.Organic practices were introduced in Ghana in the late 1990s as an environmentally friendly option.