The impact of conservation agriculture adoption on farmer welfare: a comparative assessment of Zambia and Zimbabwe

Abstract

A comprehensive study on the impact of conservation agriculture on farmer welfare has largely remained empirically untested in Africa. Where the impact of conservation agriculture has been estimated, essential non-monetary services such as food security, soil health, social cohesion, gender disparities, resilience to drought, adaptation to climate change and environmental sustainability have not been studied together. In addition, no study compares the adoption and impact of CA between Zimbabwe and Zambia. This study uses pooled cross-sectional data from 279 project and 127 non-project participants drawn from Zambia and Zimbabwe to test whether conservation agriculture (CA) causally improves smallholder farmer welfare. We estimated the propensity score matching model using the nearest neighbour, stratification and kernel matching algorithms to determine the causal impact of conservation agriculture on farmer welfare. The results show that CA has statistically significant causal impact on increasing total agricultural yield (t=6.332, p=0.000), maize yield (t=4.806, p=0.000), resilience to drought (t=7.102, p=0.000), adaptation to climate change impacts (t=6.496, p=0.000), number of meals per day (t=5.103, p=0.000), food security (t=3.639, p=0.000), household income (t=1.694, p=0.10), accumulation of productive assets (t=2.338, p=0.05), ability to address agricultural calendar bottlenecks (t=6.123, p=0.000), increasing production costs (t=2.639, p=0.01), addressing gender disparities (t=5.743, p=0.000), improving soil health (t=6.581, p=0.000) and reducing the amount of forest area cleared per year (t=2.951, p=0.01). However, CA had no statistically significant impact on the number of food-insecure months and social cohesion. We observe that Zimbabwe farmers have access to 2.7 meals per day compared to Zambia’s 2.9 meals per day. It shows that conservation agriculture has had more impact in Zambia than in Zimbabwe. Since the cross-country analysis shows that farmers in Zimbabwe are more likely to adopt CA, policy in Zambia could similarly increase adoption rates by focussing on promoting the technology among older farmers, especially those who perceive soil fertility as low. This study shows that CA improves the welfare of smallholder farmers through improved agronomic, food security, economic, social and environmental benefits that it offers. Therefore, the results point to the need to promote extension services to build capacity among farmers, improve markets for inputs such as jab planters and Chaka hoes (CA specialised weeding hoes), and introduce and train farmers on the use of herbicides to reduce labour demands. Agriculture extension remains the most reliable source of information on better production methods and agricultural practices, including labour saving and production intensification. Keywords: Conservation agriculture, propensity score matching, welfare outcomes, Zambia, Zimbabwe.