Abstract
The ‘high speed’ rotavator is used for shallow tillage to create a fine tilth and incorporate crop residues, often with a single tractor pass. Rotavator tillage has spread quickly in many parts of South Asia, despite short‐term experimental trials suggesting deteriorating soil quality and crop yield penalties. Evidence of rotavator impacts on farmer fields across soil gradients and time is largely absent. From a farm household survey conducted among wheat farmers in Nepal, we estimate wheat yield and profitability outcomes for rotavator adopters and non‐adopters using propensity score matching. We find that rotavator adoption leads to inferior outcomes, despite significant cost savings for land preparation (US$ 11–15 per hectare). With rotavator adoption, farmers lose about 284–309 kg of wheat grain and about US$ 93–101 of profits on average per hectare per season, and these penalties increase with longer‐term use of the technology. Adoption of rotavator appears to be driven by the cost and time savings for land preparation. Against this backdrop, new policy and extension efforts are required that discourage rotavator use and favour more sustainable tillage technologies.
Highlights
The spread of rotavators or rotary tillers – tractor-operated high speed tillage machinery that breaks the soil with the help of rotating ‘L’ or ‘J’-shaped blades to create fine tilth – has been rapid in many parts of South Asia (Erenstein, 2010)
The insights gained from examining the field and plot conditions affected by rotavator adoption in Nepal have wider geographical significance, as diffusion of rotavator tillage is rapid in other countries of South Asia (Krishna et al, 2012)
Early sowing of wheat in South Asia can have a significant positive impact on wheat yield (Lobell et al, 2013; Keil et al, 2015), our results suggest that rotavator tillage could be offsetting the yield advantage of early sowing
Summary
The development of farming technologies that are environmentally sustainable and financially beneficial to farmers has become a key topic of agronomic research in the last two decades. We attempt to: (i) verify whether the effects of rotavators are negative in farmers’ fields in terms of both yield and profitability; if so, (ii) identify the rationale behind the farmer acceptance of this ‘unsustainable’ technology. The insights gained from examining the field and plot conditions affected by rotavator adoption in Nepal have wider geographical significance, as diffusion of rotavator tillage is rapid in other countries of South Asia (Krishna et al, 2012). Rotavators are prevalent in other countries, as indicated by Paman et al (2015) in Indonesia, Rizwan et al (2017) in Pakistan, Memon et al (2018) in China etc., the literature on its diffusion rate and agronomic or economic effects at the farm level has remained scant.
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