Abstract
AbstractDespite decades of investment in agricultural extension, technology adoption among farmers and agricultural productivity growth in Sub‐Saharan Africa remain slow. Among other shortcomings, extension systems often make recommendations that do not account for price risk or spatial heterogeneity in farmers' growing conditions. However, little is known about the effectiveness of extension approaches for nutrient management that consider these issues. We analyze the impact of farmers' access to site‐specific nutrient management recommendations and to information on expected returns, provided through a digital decision support tool, for maize production. We implement a randomized controlled trial among smallholders in the maize belt of northern Nigeria. We use three waves of annual panel data to estimate immediate and longer term effects of two different extension treatments: site‐specific recommendations with and without complementary information about variability in output prices and expected returns. We find that site‐specific nutrient management recommendations improve fertilizer management practices and maize yields but do not necessarily increase fertilizer use. In addition, we find that recommendations that are accompanied by additional information about variability in expected returns induce larger fertilizer investments that persist beyond the first year. However, the magnitudes of these effects are small: we find only incremental increases in investments and net revenues over two treatment years.
Highlights
Agricultural productivity growth is considered crucial to reduce rural poverty, improve food security, and stimulate structural transformation in poor countries (Haggblade, Hazell, and Dorosh 2007; Barrett et al 2017; Mellor 2017; Ligon and Sadoulet 2018)
Our study contributes to the nascent empirical literature on how newly emerging digital and farmer-tailored agronomy tools affect the performance of smallholder farms in developing countries and to understanding the role of price risk in farmers’ adoption of extension advice
Using an experimental approach and panel data from three years, we estimate the impact of information and communication technology-enabled plot-specific fertilizer recommendations for smallholder maize farmers in northern Nigeria
Summary
Agricultural productivity growth is considered crucial to reduce rural poverty, improve food security, and stimulate structural transformation in poor countries (Haggblade, Hazell, and Dorosh 2007; Barrett et al 2017; Mellor 2017; Ligon and Sadoulet 2018). Despite considerable variation in smallholders’ growing conditions in SSA, such as soil quality and microclimate, traditional agricultural extension systems typically provide general or “blanket” fertilizer recommendations across wide and heterogeneous areas (Shehu et al 2018; Theriault, Smale, and Haider 2018; Burke et al 2019) Such recommendations are not tailored to the site-specific conditions of individual farmers and do not account for spatio-temporal variation in biophysical and socioeconomic conditions (Vanlauwe et al 2015; Jayne et al 2019; Rurinda et al 2020). Farmers in the control group receive blanket fertilizer recommendations and no information on prices or expected returns. We
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