Abstract
Conservation Agriculture (CA) is promoted worldwide on the basis of its contribution to economic, social, and environmental sustainability of agricultural production. In Ghana, despite the increasing interest in the promotion of CA and its practices, its rate of adoption is still low, mainly due to the conflicting evidences regarding its effectiveness. This paper contributes to the numerous debates by examining the impact of CA practices on hired labour, rates of inorganic fertilizers applied by adopters, maize yield, and profit of adopters. Using a cross-sectional data, a multinomial endogenous switching regression (MESR) model was employed to compute the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) and Average Treatment Effect on Treated (ATET) for yield, hired labour, inorganic fertilizer rate, and profit of adopters of CA practices. The study reveals that CA practices impact positively on hired labour employed on the farm, but have a negative impact on profits of adopters. No impact whatsoever of adoption of CA practices is observed on maize yield and also inorganic fertilizer application rates. Technical assistance, and training of farmers on strategies that minimize costs of production must be intensified to raise profits of adopters.
Highlights
With the failure of the green revolution to meet the goals of sustainable production (Basu and Scholten, 2012), alternate technologies and practices were suggested and still emerging from rigorous research as the way forward to attaining sustainability in agriculture
Applying the multinomial endogenous switching regression (MESR) model in this study and using a cross-sectional data, this study analysed the impact of adoption of minimum tillage, maize-legume rotation, and integrated organic-inorganic fertilizer practices on both inputs use and performance
Results of the study reveal that conservation practices have a positive impact on farm employment, but impacts negatively on profits of adopters, which is detrimental economically to these smallholder commercial maize producers
Summary
With the failure of the green revolution to meet the goals of sustainable production (Basu and Scholten, 2012), alternate technologies and practices were suggested and still emerging from rigorous research as the way forward to attaining sustainability in agriculture. The term “CA” emerged in the 1990s when efforts were made to group a number of crop management practices under a common name (e.g. zero/no-tillage, minimum tillage, etc.) (Hobbs, Sayre, and Gupta, 2008). The rationale for this grouping was that conservation agriculture should be viewed as an integrated management system based on three principles that are crucial to sustaining agricultural production (Hobbs, Sayre, and Gupta, 2008; Sommer et al, 2014; Vanlauwe et al, 2014). Local adaptations can present CA as differing from one geographical location to another, but of most importance is the conformity to the principles of CA (Erenstein, 2003)
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