There are quite a lot of studies from global and regional perspectives that touch on sustainable water use in agriculture. As a result, we explored Biblioshiny to review the scholarly research on the sustainable use of water in agriculture. Using data analysis and visualization technique of 4106 documents authored by 12,686 scholars in 724 journals published between 1990 and 2022, we find that research on this topic gained momentum in 2007 and has followed a steady increase with an annual growth rate of ~16.12%. The results of the co-occurrence network mappings highlight five trendy topics in research on sustainable water use in agriculture, which were categorized based on five (5) Word Minimum Frequency and Number of Words per Year. These topics include the AquaCrop model, Agroforestry, Biochar, No-tillage, and Diet. While renowned journals such as Agricultural Water Management, followed by Sustainability and Water, have taken leading roles in pushing research on sustainable water use in agriculture. Regarding the impact of perspective, in terms of institutional affiliation and countries, we found that the top three most prominent affiliated institutions producing publications allied to research on the sustainable use of water in agriculture are Northwest A&F University in Xianyang, China, China Agricultural University, and Hohai University in Nanjing, China, while the top three countries are China, the USA, and Australia, accounting for 45,039 (43.4%) of the total 103,900 global citations. The study’s findings can be helpful to scholars in presenting an overview of the literature on the sustainable use of water in agriculture.

Farmers use credit from commercial credit providers to finance production activities. Commercial credit providers have to predict the financial sustainability of the enterprise to ensure that the borrower will have the ability to repay the loan. A Delphi study was conducted to explore what factors are used as indicators of loan-repayment ability of farmers. The objective was not only to identify factors that are currently considered, but also to identify other personal attributes that may improve the accuracy in predicting the repayment ability of potential borrowers. The Delphi was applied to a panel consisting of nine credit analysts and credit managers from a commercial credit provider in South Africa. The results indicate that the current and past financial performance, account standing, collateral, and credit record of the farm are very important in the assessment of applications in terms of financial performance. Experience and the success factors compared to competitors were found to be important, while age and education/qualification are regarded as less important in predicting repayment ability. The results also show that, although not currently objectively included in credit evaluations, credit analysis regards leadership and human relations; commitment and confidence; internal locus of control; self-efficacy; calculated risk taking; need for achievement; and opportunity seeking as important indicators of the ability of potential borrows to repay their loans. Thus, credit analysts and managers also regard management abilities and entrepreneurial characteristics of potential borrowers to be good indicators of repayment ability. Results from this research provide new indicator factors that can be used to extend existing credit evaluation instruments in order to more accurately predict repayment ability.

Recurring agricultural droughts are of concern to smallholder livestock farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. This study determined the impact of agricultural drought resilience on smallholder livestock farming households’ welfare in the Frances Baard District Municipality (FBDM), in Northern Cape Province of South Africa. Interviews, more specifically survey interviews, were conducted with 207 smallholder livestock farmers. We used compensation variation, resilience index and linear regression models to analyse the data. The findings indicate that smallholder farmers who received drought relief support saw an improvement in their welfare. However, the welfare improvements varied across respondents and different gender categories, with males having higher welfare improvements relative to females. The study also found that economic capital, social capital, human capital and natural capital substantially affected the welfare of smallholder farmers. Furthermore, the study revealed that the smallholder farmers had a moderate agricultural drought resilience index, but low natural resilience capital. The study recommends that governments and non-governmental policymakers aiming to improve the welfare of smallholder farmers should focus on building their economic, social, human and capital resource bases. In this way, the smallholder farmers will be resilient in a time of climatic shock.