Adoption and impact of integrated agriculture aquaculture on income and productivity of smallholder fish farmers in Kenya

This paper examines the impact of integrated agriculture aquaculture (IAA) adoption on productivity and net farm incomes among smallholder fish farming households in Kenya. To control for selection bias, the paper uses an endogenous switching regression model (ESR) on farm-level cross-sectional data from 427 randomly selected farmers from four counties of Kenya. Results show that the adoption of IAA reduces the volatility of net yields and the risk of crop failure while significantly improving farm productivity and farmer income. Other factors found to be associated with an increase in farm productivity and farmer incomes are access to credit, secure land ownership, farmer education, number of economically active members in a household, and farm enterprise diversification. The policy implication is that integrated agriculture aquaculture is a worthwhile agricultural innovation that should be promoted by the national and sub-national governments through, say, improving farmer access to tailored credit facilities, providing appropriate farmer education and training, and linking the farmers to providers of the requisite services and input. While deliberately targeting integrated agriculture aquaculture, the governments should also pay attention to other sector-wide productivity and farmer income-enhancing measures such as access to agricultural credit, security of land tenure, less labor-intensive technologies and agricultural diversification.