Assessing differential gains that outstanding and average performing farmers attain from climate-smart cassava innovations in Nyando climate-smart villages, Kenya

Abstract

In adoption of agricultural innovations, a few farmers attain outstanding outcomes above their peer majority. This reveals a positive deviance behavior in successful deployment of technologies and innovations. Assessing this behavior in climate-smart agriculture (CSA) can reveal the yield gap in triple wins of CSA (adaptation, farm productivity and mitigation). This study investigated differential gains in these CSA triple wins between outstanding (positive deviants) and average (typical) performing farmers who have adopted climate smart cassava innovations in Nyando Climate Smart Villages (CSV). In a household survey, a sample of 150 farmers were reached, which through snowballing approach, peers identified 30 to exhibit positive deviant behaviour. Presenting these in Focus Group Discussion (FGD) with stakeholders further isolated six farmers being those they consider positive deviants (PDs) in climate smart cassava innovations. Data were subjected to cross-tabulation to generate frequencies used to compute weighted index scores. This revealed increasing magnitude and was a preferred fair comparison of a sample of fewer positive deviants (n=6) with large number of typical (n=144) farmers. Results revealed substantial differences in the attained triple win gains from climate smart cassava innovations between typical and positive deviant farmers. The weighted index scores showed that positive deviant farmers had attained higher adaptability, production diversification, farm productivity and intensification, food security and were implementing more mitigation practices for climate change. This empirical evidence demonstrates potential gains from climate smart cassava innovations when deployed effectively. This is because innovative management practices distinguish positive deviant farmers from typical farmers. These typical farmers would benefit more by learning from positive deviant farmers about effective deployment of climate smart cassava innovations. The study recommends strengthening extension services linked to farmer platforms in order to grow capacity for more effective deployment of climate smart cassava innovations for realising the CSA triple wins. Key words: Adaptability, food security, productivity, production diversification, positive deviants, cassava innovation