Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2021 Jun 28;16(6):e0253377. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0253377. eCollection 2021.
Can improving access to mobile extension improve agricultural productivity? Recent evidence suggests both significant and insignificant ways in which SMS-based agricultural information could affect farming outcomes. It is unclear if variations in the programs' design or the methodological challenges in evaluating the programs cause wide-ranging impacts. Extension hotline services provide rapid, unambiguous information by agricultural experts over the phone, tailored to time- and crop-specific shocks. Using methods from experimental economics, we randomly distributed the hotline number to generate exogenous variation in the access to farming information. We conducted our study among 300 farmers in the South Indian state of Karnataka. Our results show that eliminating informational inefficiencies increases farmers' average yields for a high-stakes pigeon pea crop that faced adverse aggregate shock. The impact on the yield is through the adoption of cost-effective and improved farming practices. However, we do not observe any effect on the crops that were not affected by the shock. Our findings reveal that advisory recommendations customized to time- and crop-specific shocks are associated with a greater impact on agricultural productivity.
提高移动扩展的可及性能否提高农业生产力？最近的证据表明，基于短信的农业信息可以通过多种显著和不显著的方式影响农业成果。目前尚不清楚是项目设计的差异还是评估项目的方法学挑战导致了广泛的影响。农业专家通过农业热线服务提供快速、明确的电话信息，针对特定时间和特定作物的冲击进行定制。我们使用实验经济学的方法，随机分配热线号码，以产生获取农业信息的外生变化。我们在印度南部卡纳塔克邦的 300 名农民中进行了这项研究。我们的结果表明，消除信息效率低下会提高农民在面临不利总冲击的高风险 pigeon pea 作物上的平均产量。这种对产量的影响是通过采用具有成本效益和改进的农业实践实现的。然而，我们在没有受到冲击的作物上没有观察到任何效果。我们的研究结果表明，针对特定时间和特定作物的冲击定制的咨询建议与农业生产力的更大影响相关。
