Estimating the Impact of Crop Diversity on Agricultural Productivity in South Africa

Bellora, Cecilia; Blanc, Élodie; Bourgeon, Jean-Marc; Strobl, Eric

doi:10.3386/w23496

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 56 publications

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“…The estimation procedure was described in detail by Lobell et al (2003). Bellora et al (2017) used the NDVI derived from SPOT-5 satellite imagery, combined with land use classification to quantify crop biomass to study the effect of crop diversity on resilience and productivity. The authors used field boundaries and land use classification to compute an index on crop diversity.…”

Section: Measuring Yield Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating adoption and impacts of agricultural management practices in developing countries using satellite data. A scoping review

Kubitza

Krishna

Schulthess

et al. 2020

Agron. Sustain. Dev.

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Development and dissemination of sustainable practices are key to enhance agricultural productivity in developing countries and to curtail potential negative externalities. Rigorous adoption/impact evaluations provide valuable lessons to enhance the capacity of agricultural research-for-development (R4D) systems in this context. Conventional evaluation studies rely solely on farmhousehold surveys for data. Generation of survey data however requires considerable financial and human capital, and the process often misses several important explanatory variables, ignores the longer-term impacts, and suffers from measurement errors. Complementary data sources are explored to make the evaluations more robust and rigorous. Here we review 54 studies that used satellite data to estimate adoption and impact of agricultural practices in developing countries. Some evidence on successful application of satellite data in high-income countries is also provided. The main findings of the paper are threefold: (1) satellite data have been successfully used to detect agricultural practices, such as cropping intensity, tillage, crop residue cover, irrigation, and soil and water conservation; (2) only a few studies have estimated the yield impacts of agricultural practices, although the estimation of crop yields with satellite data is fairly developed; and (3) only a small number of studies have explored impact estimation beyond the biophysical sphere. Estimation of certain environmental impacts of agricultural practices is possible through satellite data, although only a few studies have carried it out. Not many have assessed the economic impacts of interventions. We conclude that satellite data analysis allows information access with little delay and over longer periods, provide a unique set of variables over wide geographies, and reduce measurement error in certain variables. However, more interdisciplinary research is necessary to speed up the uptake of this alternative data source in R4D evaluations.

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Section: Measuring Yield Effectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Estimating adoption and impacts of agricultural management practices in developing countries using satellite data. A scoping review

Kubitza

Krishna

Schulthess

et al. 2020

Agron. Sustain. Dev.

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“…First, the existing literature has treated the land sparing‐sharing trade‐off and the potential benefits of crop diversity for local biodiversity as two separate issues. However, these aspects of crop management are not mutually independent in that there may be substantial (dis)economies to scale and yield gains or losses due to crop diversification (Bellora et al, 2017; Klasen et al, 2016; Mzyece & Ng'ombe, 2020). We thus here examine the role of crop diversity while also taking account of the degree of land sparing and sharing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preserving local biodiversity through crop diversification

Strobl

2021

American J Agri Economics

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Using the case study of birds and food crops, we investigate whether diversifying crop production can enhance preservation of local biodiversity. To this end we combine annual bird survey data, high resolution land use data, and phylogenetic trees to create a landscape level panel data set covering the conterminous United States for over a decade. Our econometric analysis shows that greater local food crop hetereogeneity increases local avian diversity, although this is spatially limited. Supplementary county level data provides evidence that more food crop diversity is unlikely to be at the cost of lower revenues.

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“…However, recent empirical work focusing on crop-specific avenues of adaptation has uncovered little to no evidence that farmers have successfully reduced yield sensitivity to accelerating climate change (Burke and Emerick 2016;Lobell et al 2014;Schlenker, Roberts, and Lobell 2013;Schlenker and Roberts 2009). In contrast, a parallel body of work in agroecology has turned attention to across-crop solutions, suggesting that crop diversity has the potential to buffer both productivity (Bellora et al 2017;Zimmerer 2010;Chavas 2008, 2009) and income (Baumgärtner andQuaas 2009, Di Falco andPerrings 2003) from adverse climate conditions. While researchers have proposed many mechanisms through which diversification of crop portfolios can enable adaptation, there is a dearth of large-scale empirical evidence of its effectiveness.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The second body of literature we contribute to is the active area of research on the benefits of biodiversity. Diversification is often cited as a means of reducing vulnerability to shocks, both within agriculture and in ecological systems more broadly (Bellora et al 2017, Tilman et al 2001, and Tilman and Downing 1994. Similarly, diversification as insurance is a well-accepted principle in finance and underlies modern portfolio theory.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regional Crop Diversity and Weather Shocks in India

Auffhammer

Carleton

2018

Asian Development Review

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Agriculture in both the developing and developed country context is highly sensitive to weather shocks. The intensity of these shocks is likely to increase under climate change, leading to an ongoing debate regarding the ability of farmers to insulate yields and income against accelerating environmental extremes. We study crop diversity as an avenue for increased resilience. Diversity in agricultural systems has been suggested in the agroecology and environmental economics literatures as a powerful means of on-farm insurance, both through physical and market-based channels. However, large-scale empirical evidence of its effectiveness is lacking, and crop diversity is largely absent from the empirical climate impacts literature. We examine the insurance benefits of crop diversity in the context of India at the height of the Green Revolution, a period of rapid change in agricultural diversification due to the increased penetration of a small set of high-yielding variety crops. Building on a basic empirical model from the climate impacts literature, we show that areas with higher crop diversity of planted area display measurably more drought resilience, both in terms of gross and net revenues. We decompose this aggregate result to show that diversification has implications for farmer welfare both through physical (yield) and market (price) channels.

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Estimating the Impact of Crop Diversity on Agricultural Productivity in South Africa

Cited by 8 publications

References 56 publications

Estimating adoption and impacts of agricultural management practices in developing countries using satellite data. A scoping review

Estimating adoption and impacts of agricultural management practices in developing countries using satellite data. A scoping review

Preserving local biodiversity through crop diversification

Regional Crop Diversity and Weather Shocks in India

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