Determinants of adoption of climate resilient practices and their impact on yield and household income

Abstract

Climate change poses a risk to the livelihoods of rural communities by negatively impacting agricultural output and raising production costs. Climate-smart agricultural (CSA) practices have been advanced as a possible solution to adapt to and mitigate climate change issues. This paper examined the main drivers of adoption of two CSA practices such as crop rotation and integrated soil management and their impact on paddy yield and net agricultural income. Household survey data was obtained from the coastal and inland districts of an eastern Indian state, namely, Odisha. Multivariate Probit model was used to identify the determinants of CSA adoption and Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method was used to assess the impacts of these adopted CSA practices. The findings from the PSM method show that both paddy crop yield and net agricultural income have been higher for the adopters of crop rotation and integrated soil management. While, adoption of crop rotation resulted in an increase of 42–45% in farm income, the same for integrated soil management was between 27 and 34%. Further, adoption of these practices led to a yield improvement of about 2.5 quintals per acre of paddy crop for the adopters. The major drivers that jointly influenced farmers to adopt these practices were found to be access to extension service, access to credit, subsidies for seed and electricity use in agriculture. In light of these findings, main policy suggestions are – (i) extension staff need to be trained on regular basis on the technical aspects of CSA practices and (ii) more finances for CSA need to be raised and allocated for strengthening extension support, providing timely subsidies to the right beneficiaries and building CSA enabling infrastructure such as watershed projects and micro-irrigation facilities.