Agricultural extension to improve yields of staple food crops and close the yield gap in Sub-Saharan Africa often entails general recommendations on soil fertility management that are distributed to farmers in a large growing area. Site-specific extension recommendations that are better tailored to the needs of individual farmers and fields, and enabled by digital technologies, could potentially bring about yield and productivity improvements. In this paper, we analyze farmers' preferences for high-input maize production supported by site-specific nutrient management recommendations provided by an ICT-based extension tool that is being developed for extension services in the maize belt of Nigeria. We use a choice experiment to provide ex-ante insights on the adoption potentials of site-specific extension services from the perspective of farmers. We control for attribute non-attendance and account for class as well as scale heterogeneity in preferences using different models, and find robust results. We find that farmers have strong preferences to switch from general to ICT-enabled site-specific soil fertility management recommendations which lend credence to the inclusion of digital technologies in agricultural extension. We find heterogeneity in preferences that is correlated with farmers' resource endowments and access to services. A first group of farmers are strong potential adopters; they are better-off, less sensitive to risk, and are more willing to invest in a high-input maize production system. A second group of farmers are weak potential adopters; they have lower incomes and fewer productive assets, are more sensitive to yield variability, and prefer less capital and labor intensive production techniques. Our empirical findings imply that improving the design of extension tools to enable provision of information on the riskiness of expected outcomes and flexibility in switching between low-risk and high-risk recommendations will help farmers to make better informed decisions, and thereby improve the uptake of extension advice and the efficiency of extension programs.

Despite 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.

Much of the empirical studies on crop varietal adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa relied on self-reported adoption in farm-household surveys, which is prone to measurement errors. In addition, farmers’ perceptions of consumption-related varietal traits in adoption studies has received limited attention compared with production-related traits. Using DNA-based and self-reported adoption measures, we analyze the adoption of improved cassava varieties (ICVs) with a focus on the extent of varietal misidentification, the sensitivity of the drivers of adoption to varietal misidentification and the role of farmers’ perceptions of biofortification trait in adoption decisions. We find that the adoption rate of ICVs is relatively high using both DNA-based and self-reported adoption measures, but there is notable misclassification in varietal adoption. We find that the mismatch in DNA-based and self-reported adoption measures leads to some variation in the factors that influence the likelihood and intensity of adoption of ICVs. This suggests that appropriate varietal identification helps in better understanding of the drivers of adoption. In addition, we find that despite the observed varietal misclassification, farmers’ perceptions of biofortification trait is significantly correlated with the probability and intensity of adoption of ICVs using both DNA-based and self-reported varietal identification. This suggests that inclusion of biofortification trait in cassava matters for both the likelihood and extent of adoption of ICVs. The latter lends credence to the emerging policy interests in breeding programs for biofortified crops to address hidden hunger in Nigeria.

The adoption of soil conservation practices is widely recognized as essential in improving soil fertility and promoting climate-smart agriculture in general. Yet, smallholders’ adoption of soil conservation practices in Sub-Saharan Africa has not been adequately documented, especially in relation to the interdependence and temporal dynamics of adoption decisions. In this paper, we analyze the interdependence and temporal dynamics of smallholders’ adoption of soil conservation practices, such as animal manure, crop residue retention, intercropping, and crop rotation in northern Nigeria. We use data from two rounds of a farm-household panel survey among maize-based farming households and estimate econometric models, including pooled multivariate probit and random effects ordered probit. We found that there is a significant positive correlation between the soil conservation practices, suggesting that adoption decisions for these practices are interrelated and the practices are considered complements by the farmers. We found evidence of inter-temporal variability in the adoption of soil conservation practices, which suggests that some farmers do switch in and out of these practices and may likely explain the often-reported variability in maize yields. Also, we found that the farmers’ decisions to adopt soil conservation practices and the intensity of adoption are influenced by several factors, including farmer-, household-, farm-, institutional-, and biophysical-level factors. Yet, the factors that significantly influence the likelihood of adoption differ slightly from those that influence the intensity of adoption. Policy interventions to enhance the adoption intensity of conservation practices should strongly leverage important factors, such as contract farming, crop–livestock integration, and off-farm income diversification.

This study was carried out to examine the relationship between cocoa production in Nigeria and agricultural credit guarantee scheme fund using time series data on cocoa production in Nigeria, value of loans guaranteed and number of loans guaranteed spanning over the period of 1981 to 2011. The Johansen cointegration test was employed in this study and the result indicated that there was no cointegrating relationship between cocoa production in Nigeria and Agricultural credit guarantee scheme fund over the period under study. This could be attributed to the guaranteeing of few number as well as limited value of credit to the farmers by agricultural credit guarantee scheme fund and the high incidence of loan diversion by the cocoa farmers who had access to the loans guaranteed by agricultural credit guarantee scheme fund. It is recommended that the number as well as the value of credit guaranteed to cocoa farmers should be significantly increased so as to enable the farmers expand their production and thereby, reposition the cocoa to assume a critical role as a major non-oil foreign exchange earner in the Agricultural transformation plan of Nigeria.