Does Minimum Tillage Improve Smallholder Farmers’ Welfare? Evidence from Southern Tanzania

Abstract

Conservation agriculture continues to be promoted in developing nations as a sustainable and suitable agricultural practice to enhance smallholder productivity. A look at the literature indicates that this practice is successful in non-African countries. Thus, this research sought to test whether minimum tillage (MT), a subset of conservation agriculture, could lead to a significant impact on smallholder households’ welfare in Southern Tanzania. Using cross-sectional data from 608 randomly selected smallholder households, we applied propensity score matching to determine the effects of adopting minimum tillage on smallholder households’ per capita net crop income and labor demand. Our results indicated that minimum tillage adoption has positive impacts on smallholder households’ per capita net crop income. Further, it reduces the total household labor demands, allowing households to engage in other income-generating activities. However, the adoption rate of minimum tillage is in the early majority stage (21.38%). Thus, we propose the government to support household credit access and extension-specific information to improve the probability of adopting minimum tillage.

Welfare impacts of conservation agriculture adoption on smallholder maize farmers in South Africa

“…Osewe et al . (2020) studied the impact of MT on the welfare of smallholder farmers in Southern Tanzania. They focused on the effects of MT adoption on households' per capita net crop income and labor demand.…”

“…As mentioned earlier in this section, Osewe et al . (2020) found that the adoption of MT in Southern Tanzania had a significant reduction in labor demand thereby affording the household members more time for other non-farm income opportunities. In a similar vein, Johansen et al .…”

“…Contrary to Osewe et al . (2020), other authors (Montt and Luu, 2018) looked at how CA influences labor requirements in Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. Their findings showed that CA increases farms' labor input requirements, especially during the harvesting and threshing stages.…”

Poverty and Resilience impacts of conservation agriculture adoption against Climatic-Shocks in Eastern Ethiopia

“…Most of the literature shows an increased weed effect due to minimum tillage [20], but others focus on its benefits [21]. Other literature on the impacts of technology on productivity [20,22,23,24], impact on crop income [19] and impact of practices on farm labor [25,26]. There is also other literature on the impacts of CA on food security [27,28,29].…”

The choice of land conservation technique and effects on technical efficiency of potato farming in the highland of Bandung Regency, West Java

“…Various public policies, such as subsidized prices for seeds and fertilizers, subsidized credit interest and easy access for farmers to sources of financing, have been implemented to encourage food production growth [7]. However, what is still lacking adequate attention is how to maintain the productive capacity of the increasingly limited agricultural land [8,9]. Agricultural land that is cultivated intensively, and ignores the principles of sustainability, will eventually experience degradation.…”