Modeling the Impact of Climate and Fertilizer on Barley Production

Abstract

Agriculture is a confirmed path to success. No region of the world has developed a diverse, modern economy without first establishing a successful foundation in agriculture. Food security is an enduring critical challenge in Ethiopia. The 2015 El Niño drought is one of the strongest droughts that have been recorded in Ethiopian antiquity. The study aims to evaluate the impacts of climate change and fertilizers applied on barley yield per hectare from 1987 to 2017 using an autoregressive distributed lag to cointegration approach. The mean barley yield was 11.47 quintal per hectare. The Long run bounded test for cointegration among the variables show signal of a long-run relationship with a short run among climate change, fertilizers applied and barley yield per hectare. Based on the value of adjusted R 2 , the explanatory variables explained almost 76% of the variation in the yield of barley. In the long run estimates every 1% rise in current average dap decrease the yield per hectare of barley by 28.76% at citrus paribus and a 1% rise in current precipitation and rainfall increase the yield of barley by 2.768% and 0.41% respectively keeping the effect of one variable to the other constant. The speed of adjustment is -0.381557 which is highly significant indicating the speed of the adjustment back to the long run equilibrium after a short run shock.