The Role of Extension and Information in the Adoption of Integrated Soil Fertility Practices and Impacts on Farmers' Welfare: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Ethiopia

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High levels of land degradation represent one of the major challenges for sustainable intensification of agricultural productivity. Soil degradation is associated with declining soil fertility and yield deficits that represent a particular threat for the livelihoods of smallholder farm households in Sub-Saharan Africa. A wide range of integrated soil fertility management (ISFM) techniques have been developed to restore, maintain and increase soil functions. Despite the potential benefits of these practices, adoption rates among smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa remain low. A large body of literature focuses on investigating the determinants of adoption using mostly cross-sectional data. These studies often identify the lack of information as an important barrier to adoption and accordingly emphasize the importance of agricultural extension services to promote a wider diffusion of the technologies. Despite high policy relevance, there is comparatively little rigorous evidence on the impact of extension programs on farmers' knowledge and adoption behavior to date. This study proposes a randomized controlled trial to assess the effects of decentralized, farmer-to-farmer extension and video-mediated information provision on farmers' knowledge, self-efficacy, and adoption of ISFM practices. It will thus provide rigorous evidence on the effectiveness of a low-cost extension approach to promote a complex package of agricultural technologies. Furthermore, heterogeneous treatment effects will be analyzed with a particular focus on community-level social capital. Given that the decentralized extension approach relies on farmer-to-farmer knowledge transfer, we expect its effectiveness to be conditioned by the extent of pre-existing social capital in a community. Finally, we aim to assess the welfare effects associated with the adoption of ISFM practices. The proposed study builds on available baseline data from 2595 farm households in the Ethiopian highlands. We plan to collect follow-up data from the same households, and complement our data set with crop cuts from a random sub-sample of 210 households. Econometric techniques will be used to estimate the intention-to-treat effects of the extension and information interventions and to analyze heterogeneous treatment effects. In addition, we will estimate plot-level yield functions with self-reported yield data from approx. 8000 plots and - for validation - with crop-cut data from approx. 600 plots. Finally, employing techniques such as endogenous switching regression, we estimate income effects at the household level. The proposed study will advance the research direction by providing rigorous evidence from a large-scale randomized controlled trial on delivery mechanisms for sustainable agricultural technologies. These insights will also be valuable for policy makers and development practitioners for designing and up-scaling interventions and thereby achieving development goals more effectively.