Information acquisition and adoption of conservation agriculture by smallholder farmers in South-West Nigeria: Recursive bivariate probit estimation

Abstract

The persistent use of traditional farming practices and cultivation of low yielding variety of crops on scattered small farmland holdings by agrarian farming households in Nigeria has put pressure on land and water resources, consequently leading to depletion of soil productivity with spill-over effects on the environment, crop-output and farm-income. Addressing this requires a holistic approach, especially in light of farmers’ apathy towards transitioning from traditional farming practices to more sustainable ones, and motivated this research. This research used cross-sectional survey data obtained from 350 farmers randomly chosen from South-West Nigeria. This study applied a descriptive statistical technique to present the mean statistics of sampled farmers’ characteristics. Similarly, the study applied a bivariate probit model to examine the influences on farmers’ decisions about conservation agriculture (CA) adoption, as well as to isolate the factors driving farmers’ choices on acquisition of information decision and the use of CA practices. The results revealed that decisions to acquire information and adopt CA were jointly determined by farmers, owing to the positive and strong correlation parameter-rho in the estimated model. More so, the post-estimation Murphy test score apparently revealed no significant departure from the normal and jointly distributed error terms.