Too fast or too slow: The speed and persistence of adoption of conservation agriculture in southern Africa

Conservation agriculture (CA) represents a paradigm shift towards more sustainable and climate-smart intensification of smallholder farming systems in southern Africa. This can only be achieved with reasonably fast, widespread, and sustained adoption of CA. However, many farmers are slow to adopt CA and when they do, they often do not continue using it and eventually dis-adopt. We combine duration models with selection and quantile regression models for count data to study how long farmers take to adopt conservation agriculture once they are trained; and to assess the distributional effects of drivers of the persistence of adoption once a farmer adopts. We find that farmers take on average four years to adopt once trained and that there is a congruence between factors that reduce the duration to and persistence of adoption. Access to CA extension and credit, labor availability, education and hosting demonstrations increase the speed of adoption by 13 – 28%. Time since the first training, extension, and farming experience increase the persistence of adoption, especially in the initial years. These findings point to the need for implementing multi-year CA promotional programs with medium-term time horizons that should prioritize enhanced training through community-embedded demonstrations and learning sites, and digital extension.