Estimating farmers’ internal value of crop residues in smallholder crop-livestock systems: A South Asia case study

Abstract

Crop residues (CR) are an important, internally produced resource with several uses on smallholder, mixed crop-livestock farms, including livestock feed, mulch, fuel and construction material. This study sets out to develop a method to estimate the internal shadow value of CR as feed and as mulch for smallholder households. The study uses a South Asia case study as illustration using data from a set of village and household surveys in three different sites. The estimated shadow prices were higher for CR as mulch than for CR as feed at all three sites. These results reject the null hypothesis that the estimated shadow price for CR as feed is greater than the shadow price for CR as mulch. Since the null hypothesis was formed based on observing household behavior, the rejection of the null hypothesis implies that there are other reasons to explain why more households use CR as feed versus as mulch.

Conservation Agriculture in Semi-Arid Zimbabwe: A Promising Practice to Improve Finger Millet (Eleusine coracana Gaertn.) Productivity and Soil Water Availability in the Short Term

“…Three principles, namely reduced tillage, mulching through covering the soil surface with at least 30% crop residues and diversified cropping systems that include a legume crop either in rotations or mixtures, form the basis of CA [19]. Conservation agriculture may greatly improve rainfed crop yields due to increased soil moisture, reduced water loss and sometimes topsoil temperature modification from the mulch cover [20][21][22]. Not all smallholder farmers in SSA practice all the three CA principles.…”

“…Some farmers choose to practice conventional tillage, instead of reduced tillage, which is often associated with the emergence of permanent weeds, according to Giller et al [23], while embracing mulching and crop diversification principles. Some may choose to drop mulching because available crop residues are used for feeding livestock, but in practice reduce tillage and crop diversification [20]. Crop diversification can be a challenge for some farmers; hence, they may choose to only concentrate on the cereals that are guaranteed to be marketable as staple food [24].…”