Abstract
Increased climate variability during the last four decades has made the agricultural environment in many developing countries more uncertain, resulting in increasing exposure to risk when producing crops. In this study, we use recent farm‐level data from Ghana to examine the drivers of individual and joint adoption of crop choice and soil and water conservation practices, and how adoption of these practices impacts on farm performance (crop revenue) and exposure to risks (skewness of crop yield). We employ a multinomial endogenous switching regression model to account for selectivity bias due to both observable and unobservable factors. The empirical results reveal that farmers’ adoption of crop choice and soil and water conservation leads to higher crop revenues and reduced riskiness in crop production, with the largest impact on crop revenues coming from joint adoption. The findings also show that education of the household head, access to extension and weather information influence the likelihood of adopting these practices. Thus, enhancing extension services and access to climate information and irrigation can reduce gaps in adoption of soil and water conservation and crop choice, considered as climate‐smart practices that will eventually improve crop revenues and reduce farmers’ exposure to climate‐related production risks.
Highlights
Climate variability continues to be a major challenge to achieving food security in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) due to the incidence of high temperature, erratic rainfall regimes, coupled with low adoption of modern technologies (IPCC 2007; World Bank 2010)
The results indicate that characteristics of the household head, household endowments, inputs, climate and plot-specific variables influence the adoption decisions of individual, crop choice only, soil and water conservation only, and joint adoption
The results show that increasing variability in rainfall, combined with rising temperature would likely influence the adoption of crop choice only and joint adoption, but not necessarily soil and water conservation only, a finding that is consistent with the results reported by Moniruzzaman (2015)
Summary
Climate variability continues to be a major challenge to achieving food security in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) due to the incidence of high temperature, erratic rainfall regimes, coupled with low adoption of modern technologies (IPCC 2007; World Bank 2010). The study by Di Falco and Veronesi (2013) indicates that adaptation to climate change, through adoption of soil conservation, changing crop varieties, switching from early to late planting and other measures, led to increased yield of maize among farm households in Ethiopia. The mixed findings from these studies about adoption impacts on farm performance provide motivation for further empirical investigation into the potential impacts of specific climate-smart agricultural practices on crop revenues and production risk exposure, with respect to agroecology. We examine joint adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices and how adoption impacts on crop revenues and exposure to production risk among mixed-crop farmers in Ghana.
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