IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ags/haaewp/316602.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Digital nutrient management decision support and environmental footprints of maize intensification: A Randomized evaluation from Nigeria

Author

Listed:
  • Oyinbo, Oyakhilome

Abstract

Agricultural intensification associated with increased use of external inputs, such as inorganic fertilizer is widely considered relevant to improving farm income and welfare of smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. The emphasis on increased use of inorganic fertilizer will likely be associated with increased greenhouse gas emissions, especially nitrous oxide, as with the Asian Green Revolution. Yet, traditional agricultural extension systems typically provide generalized ‘blanket’ fertilizer recommendations that are not tailored to the plot-specific growing conditions of individual farmers, which could lead to negative environmental externalities. Within this context, a digital nutrient management decision support tool ‘Nutrient Expert’ has been co-developed in Nigeria to enable the extension system to transition from provision of generalized to plot-specific fertilizer recommendations. Using a three-year randomized controlled trial in northern Nigeria, this paper analyses the impact of farmers’ access to site-specific nutrient management recommendations, provided through the Nutrient Expert tool on environmental sustainability of maize intensification. The primary outcome of interest is global warming potential (greenhouse gas emission per unit maize yield), measured using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Tier 1 method. The preliminary results show that the provision of tailored recommendations to the treatment group led to a reduction in global warming potential compared with the control group, who were exposed to blanket recommendations. However, the observed effect size is small, and the effect is not statistically significant at the conventional significance levels. A plausible reason could be due to the on average, low fertilizer application rates in the study area compared with the often cited over application of fertilizer in most parts of Asia. Overall,this paper finds weak evidence of the causal effects of farmer-tailored nutrient management extension advice on mitigating the environmental impacts of fertilizer intensification under farmers’ conditions and management in maize-based farming systems of northern Nigeria.

Suggested Citation

  • Oyinbo, Oyakhilome, 2021. "Digital nutrient management decision support and environmental footprints of maize intensification: A Randomized evaluation from Nigeria," Land, Farm & Agribusiness Management Department 316602, Harper Adams University, Land, Farm & Agribusiness Management Department.
  • Handle: RePEc:ags:haaewp:316602
    DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.316602
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/316602/files/Digital%20nutrient%20management%20decision%20support%20and%20environmental%20footprints%20of%20maize%20intensification%3A%20A%20Randomized%20evaluation%20from%20Nigeria.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.22004/ag.econ.316602?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Crop Production/Industries; Farm Management; Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ags:haaewp:316602. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: AgEcon Search (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dlhauuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.