Small Farmer Agricultural Productivity: Soils,Supply Chains, and Commercial Prospects

Hope Michelson

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

April 4, 2017

Important lessons from agricultural transitions in Latin America,South Asia:

• Among farmers, some will benefit, some will be left behind• Design and implementation of services to support small farmers

will influence who can profit from commercial opportunitiescoming to the region

Big questions:

1 What farmer-level variation will determine who benefits?2 Can existing public and private systems respond to anticipated

new demands from farmers?

Important farmer-level variation

• Access to roads, cell networks decreases productiontransactions costs, associated with increased participation incommercial ag markets (Barrett, 2008; Aker, 2010; Michelson,2013).

• Evidence of agronomically and economically important variationin soil nutrient limitations in East and Southern Africa

Soil variation is large within regions

Figure 1: Nutrient limitations on primary maize plots of 1001 randomly-selectedfarmers located in 47 villages in Morogoro District, Tanzania.

• Within a 120 square mile area, fields exhibit eight different combinations ofnutrient limitations.

Soil variation is large within regions

Nutrient deficiency Number of farms Share of farms

N only 35 0.036NP 5 0.007NK 2 0.002NS 638 0.635NPK 1 0.002NPS 214 0.214NKS 56 0.056NPKS 50 0.050Total 1001 1.00

Table 1: Nutrient limitations on primary maize plots of 1001 randomly-selected farmerslocated in 47 villages in Morogoro District, Tanzania. Government recommendedapplication for maize growers in the region is NP, highlighted in red. Intra-clustercorrelation coefficient is low for active carbon (0.004) and pH (0.02).

• Emerging evidence suggests similar variation in Central Malawi (Michelson et al.,2017), Western Kenya (Tjernstrom, 2016).

Why does sub-regional soil variation matter?• Information: Sub-regional calibration of fertilizer and

management recommendations will be necessary.• Extension: Within-village farmer learning about technologies

related to underlying agronomic heterogeneity (Munshi, 2004)• Inputs: Need capable agricultural input supply chains to deliver

the type, quantity, and quality of inputs that farmers will need

• Evidence of soil variation across farmers in the same regionmeans that input dealers have to be BETTER than theyotherwise would, especially in context of limited public extension

• Need to provide information, recommendations, quality inputs,special fertilizer blends, smaller packaged quantities, credit

Figure 2: Histogram of the Nitrogen content of 303 Urea fertilizer samples with the redvertical line indicating the 46% nitrogen Urea manufacturer standard.

• The problem: agricultural inputs supply chains are under-resourced andunder-performing in many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa

• Results (Fairbairn et al., 2017) find 10% Nitrogen missing from mineral fertilizer inMorogoro District

• Nutrients may be missing due to adulteration but also from degradation due tocapital-limited input supply chains

Figure 3: Map of share of missing Nitrogen in purchased Urea (Fairbairn et al., 2017).

Closing thoughts

Small farmer participation in new market opportunities inSub-Saharan Africa will require

• solving established problems:• credit, infrastructure, incentives, storage, aggregation

• new attention to:• the importance of soil variation to management recommendations,

farmer learning, and crop yields• agro-dealer capacity and constraints and associated input quality

problems

Thank you.

Tanzania soil information research team: Dr. Aurelie Harou (McGill), Dr. MalgosiaMadajewicz (Columbia), Kevin Tschirt (Columbia), Dr. Cheryl Palm (University ofFlorida), Dr. Johnson Semoka (Sokoine University), Dr. Nyambi Amuri (Sokoine), Dr.Chris Magomba (Sokoine)

Tanzania fertilizer quality research team: Anna Fairbairn (University of Illinois), Dr.Brenna Ellison (University of Illinois), Dr. Victor Manyong (IITA Dar es Salam)

Funding: USAID AMA CRSP grant, US Borlaug Fellows Program, UIUC ACE Office ofInternational Programs, Columbia University