Adoption and Impact of Conservation Agriculture on Smallholder Farmers’ Crop Productivity and Income in Luapula Province, Zambia

Abstract

Despite efforts to systemically disseminate Conservation Agriculture (CA) technology in Luapula Province of Zambia, the adoption rate remains limited. Furthermore, no empirical evidence has been presented on the factors influencing adoption of the technology or the extent to which farmers' livelihood has been influenced due to uptake of the technology. This study therefore examined the adoption and impact of CA on crop productivity and income on farming households in the Province. Using the 2012 Rural Agricultural Livelihood Survey (RALS) data, the study employed a probit regression model to identify factors influencing adoption of CA among the smallholder farmers in the Province. The probit regression analysis showed that advice on CA and access to wetlands/dambos by households increased the probability to adopt CA. The study also adopted the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) approach to help match the adopters and non-adopters based on observable covariates in order to assess technology impact by providing consistent estimates of the Average Treatment Effect on the Treated (ATT). The results showed a small but insignificant positive impact of CA on crop productivity and income. This suggests that adoption of CA has the potential to generate an improvement in farming households' livelihood in Luapula Province, Zambia. Therefore, adoption of CA in Luapula Province should be explicitly encouraged. This can be further enhanced by increased access to quality extension services that incorporates promotion of CA practices among the smallholder farming households in the area.

Factors Influencing the Adoption of Sujala III Watershed Interventions and Constraints Faced by Farmers

“…Hence it was positively correlated with adoption. The findings are in line with Manjunath [16] and inconsistent with Nkhoma [17]. Further, big farmers having large holdings with well economic conditions, better resource base and cropping intensity had more opportunities to try out new interventions which give them a better exposure and access to extension.…”

Understanding sustained adoption of conservation agriculture among smallholder farmers: insights from a sentinel site in Malawi

“…This finding was not unique to this study, several studies on CA in SSA (Arslan, McCarthy, and Lipper, 2013;Grabowski and Kerr, 2014;Kunzekweguta, Rich, and Lyne, 2017;Tambo and Mockshell, 2018) have reported that partial adoption of CA principles remain prevalent among smallholder farmers. When farmers were exposed to CA, they developed cropping systems (Nkhoma, Kalinda, and Kuntashula, 2017) that were intermediates between CA and CTP systems (Penot et al, 2015). These intermediate cropping systems were developed to address specific agricultural production constraints encountered by farmers under CA.…”

“…These intermediate cropping systems were developed to address specific agricultural production constraints encountered by farmers under CA. The partial adoption of CA was not only in terms of practices but also the proportion of cultivated land area under CA (Nkhoma, Kalinda, and Kuntashula, 2017). In this study, less than 50% of farmers reported practicing CA on the entire farm.…”

Impacto das práticas agrícolas conservacionistas na produtividade da terra e no lucro dos estabelecimentos agropecuários brasileiros

“…Na literatura internacional, dentre os estudos que objetivaram fazer mensurar o impacto da adoção das práticas conservacionistas em algumas variáveis de interesse, a exemplo do lucro e da produtividade, destacam-se Hammad & Borresen (2006), Uddin & Dhar (2016) e Nkhoma et al (2017). Baseados nos resultados desses trabalhos, constata-se que o impacto da adoção das práticas conservacionistas é incerto, podendo produzir rendimentos menores, equivalentes ou maiores do que o preparo convencional.…”