Sustainable intensification technologies and farm performance: evidence from smallholder sorghum farmers in Nigeria

ABSTRACT

The empirical literature on plot-level adoption of sustainable intensification technologies (SITs), as a package comprising improved crop varieties and good agronomic management practices is thin for dryland crops, such as sorghum. In this paper, we analyze the adoption and impacts of SITs on sorghum yield and net revenue using data from a sample of 1680 households and 3310 plots in the sorghum belt of Nigeria. Our estimates are based on a multinomial endogenous switching regression, which accounts for observable and unobservable sources of selection bias. We find a relatively low joint adoption of both improved sorghum varieties and good agronomic practices. In addition, we find that the adoption of only improved sorghum varieties and the joint adoption of both improved sorghum varieties and good agronomic practices led to a 56 and 102% increase in sorghum yield, respectively, and an 88 and 82% increase in net revenue, respectively. The yield and net revenue effects indicate that there are considerable missing opportunities that sorghum-producing households can harness through the adoption of SITs. Our findings reveal that policies tailored towards promoting the widespread adoption of SITs can lead to considerable productivity gains and economic returns for smallholder sorghum farmers towards improving their welfare.

KEYWORDS:

• Adoption
• Good agronomic practices
• Improved varieties
• Multinomial endogenous switching regression
• Sorghum
• Sustainable intensification

Data availability statement

The data used in this paper are accessible on request from the corresponding author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Local Government Areas (LGAs) in Nigeria are the administrative units below the state and the number of LGAs differs between the states.

2 $j_i$ represents the technology choice. $j_1=$ ISV₀GAP₀, $j_2=$ ISV₀GAP₁, $j_3=$ ISV₁GAP₀, $j_4=$ ISV₁GAP₁

3 We acknowledge that the use of extension contact as an instrument is not incontestable, especially from the point of view of exogeneity of the instrument, which often applies to most instruments in the literature, as discussed in Kubitza and Krishna (2020). However, the use of extension contact is plausible in our study setting because access to extension is less likely to have a direct effect on sorghum yield and net revenue and can only have an indirect effect that can arise through its effect on farmers’ decision to adopt agricultural technologies, such as SITs. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that extension contact can ease decision-relevant information constraints and thus, it can directly affect adoption decisions but is less likely to directly affect the outcomes of adoption decisions. In addition, the results of our falsification test show that the instrument is strongly correlated with the adoption of SITs, but not with sorghum yield and net revenue outcomes of non-adopters. Furthermore, extension-related instruments have been successfully applied in previous studies on the impacts of agricultural technologies (e.g., Abdallah et al., 2021; Kamara et al., 2022; Khonje et al., 2018; Martey et al., 2020; Mellon Bedi et al., 2022). Lastly, our robustness check using the augmented inverse probability weighting (AIPW) also allays possible concerns associated with the use of inappropriate instruments.

Additional information

Funding

The Research was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through the project ‘Harnessing Opportunities for Productivity Enhancement (HOPE) of Sorghum and Millets in sub-Saharan Africa-Phase 2’ [grant number: OPP1129015].