Sustainable intensification of agriculture will have to build on various innovations, but synergies between different types of technologies are not yet sufficiently understood. We use representative data from small farms in Kenya and propensity score matching to compare effects of input-intensive technologies and natural resource management practices on household income. When adopted in combination, positive income effects tend to be larger than when individual technologies are adopted alone. The largest gains occur when improved seeds are adopted together with organic manure and zero tillage. These results point at important synergies between plant breeding technologies and natural resource management practices.
Supermarkets and high-value exports are currently gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on farming efficiency have hardly been studied. Using a survey of...
The recent proliferation of mobile phones in rural Africa has also led to increased interest in mobile financial services (MFS), such as mobile money and mobile banking. Such services are often portrayed as promising tools to improve agricultural finance, especially...
Farm input subsidies are often criticised on economic and ecological grounds. The promotion of natural resource management (NRM) technologies is widely seen as more sustainable to increase agricultural productivity and food security. Relatively little is known about how input subsidies...
Weather risk is a serious issue in the African small farm sector that will further increase due to climate change. Farmers typically react by using low amounts of agricultural inputs. Low input use can help to minimize financial loss in...
Background
Smallholder farmers in developing countries are particularly vulnerable to climate shocks but often lack access to agricultural insurance. Weather index insurance (WII) could reduce some of the problems associated with traditional, indemnity-based insurance programs, but uptake has been lower...
