This paper examines impacts of adoption of wheat chickpea double cropping on yield and farm income of smallholder rural farmers in Becho district, South West Shewa Zone, Oromia Region, Ethiopia. The study used cross-sectional data collected from 203 smallholder farm households selected randomly through two-stage stratified random sampling technique. Propensity score matching was employed to analyze the impacts of adoption on yield and farm income. The result showed that adoption of wheat-chickpea double cropping has significant impact on yield and farm income of the group of adopter households compared to the group of nonadopters. With regard to yield, adopters harvested average wheat yield of 2120 kg/ha, while the non-adopters harvested average wheat yield of 1420 kg/ha. In addition, the treated households earned average annual farm income of about 709.125 Euro per year from sale of both wheat and chickpea as adopters; while the non-adopters earned average farm income of 129 Euro from sale of wheat. These results imply that scaling out of wheatchickpea double cropping contributes to food security and rural livelihood improvement through yield and farm income increment. Hence, encouraging farmers towards adoption of wheat-chickpea double cropping is essential for improving livelihoods of rural households by properly addressing factors such as access to improved seeds, training on double cropping, involvement in non-farm income activities, access to broad bed maker (BBM), ownership of tropical livestock unit (TLU) and access to fertilizer.
Water is a fundamental element essential for life and health. However, more than 33.3% of rural water services in Ethiopia are not functioning and hence sustainability of rural drinking water points in the country is under question. With this in mind, this study was undertaken to investigate the factors that affect the operational sustainability of rural drinking water points in Woliso woreda, Ethiopia. A semi-structured questionnaire was administered to a randomly selected 211 households from six rural Kebeles, which were selected using stratified sampling technique. Focus group discussions and key interviews were also held along with observation. The quantitative data were analysed through descriptive statistics and binary logistic regression. The qualitative data were used to augment the results from the regression analysis. The results revealed that water service fee, willingness to pay, occurrence of conflict in the water points, monitoring by water user committees, willingness to sustain service, users' participation in the water point construction, satisfaction with the water point service, perception on the possibility of contamination, and training on maintenance are found to be significant factors that affect the operational sustainability of rural drinking water points. Therefore, these significant factors should be sufficiently addressed when planning water supply projects.
There is an urgent need to increase cereal yields in the Ethiopian Highlands to ensure national food security. A major crop response-to-fertilizer program was set up in 2017–2019 as part of the CASCAPE project in the Ethiopian Highlands. It covered 33 experiments on maize, teff and wheat in five reference soil groups (Nitisols, Luvisols, Vertisols, Leptosols and Andosols). Five levels of multi-nutrient fertilizer (50–300 kg NPSZnB ha− 1 and 100 kg urea ha− 1) were applied. At the lower fertilizer level, average yields were 5500, 1500 and 3300 kg ha− 1 for maize, teff and wheat, respectively. At the highest rate, yields were 7900, 2100 and 5000 kg ha− 1. Maize and wheat yields were strongly correlated to the reference soil groups, but not to rainfall differences. Wheat yields were also positively correlated to soil organic carbon levels, underpinning the need to apply integrated soil fertility management. Comparing NPSZnB fertilizers with NPS and DAP fertilizers revealed a lack of statistically significant advantage for the fertilizers including Zn and B. As B was present in fine-granular form in the fertilizer bags, being prone to segregation, firm conclusions on the need for this micronutrient cannot be drawn. The use of ‘recommendation windows’ is suggested to group results into concrete packages at district levels and below, preferably combined with soil maps since soil types were correlated with maize and wheat yields. The windows could then be the starting point to develop ‘last mile’ fertilizer use policies, relevant to farmers and the way they manage their fields in the landscape.
In Ethiopia, farmers are cultivating potato under a wide range of environmental conditions. Despite its genetic potential, the productivity of potato is relatively low. Among the long list of production constraints, the absence of high yielding and disease resistant varieties in different corners of the country are the prominent ones. Its suitable edaphic and climatic conditions make the highlands of Girar Jarso Woreda suitable for potato production; however, it is scarce and dominated by local varieties. Hence, by employing its newly developed integrated agricultural technology evaluation protocol, CASCAPE program (Capacity building for scaling up of evidence-based agricultural technologies in Ethiopia) conducted a participatory potato variety evaluation trial at Girar Jarso in 2017 cropping season. Data related to tuber yield, acceptability, profitability, gender-related labor burden and environmental sustainability in terms of pesticide use were collected. Instead of selecting an adaptable variety merely on one parameter, for instance solely by considering yield of the crop, the recorded data on each parameter were normalized in a 1-5 scale and integrated to produce a single value for each variety. Therefore, in relation to the three rules of decision making, a potato variety (Belete) that had an over normalized score of 4.6 with a yield of 47.12 ton/ha, an acceptability score of 97.22 and 960% profitability was selected and recommended for the highlands of Girar Jarso Woreda and other areas with similar agro-ecological and social settings in the central highlands of the country. As a novel system of participatory technology evaluation technique, this paper demonstrates the approach to select and recommend a variety/technology by integrating its production potential, profitability, desirability, gender attributes, and with environmental considerations.
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