Can Smallholders Benefit from Complex Information? Digital Water Quality Monitoring in Vietnamese Aquaculture

Maintaining water quality is critical for aquaculture, yet smallholder farmers in developing countries often lack the tools to monitor it. Although earlier digital farming that provides "simple" information to farmers consistently yielded positive effects, when more detailed and personalized information are provided, the results have been mixed. Modern "aquatech" provides complex biophysical data that directly impacts productivity, and the effects likely depend on the capacity of farmers to process the "complex" information. We examine the impact of digital water-quality monitors and a farm-management app through a ten-month experiment involving shrimp farmers in Southern Vietnam. Using primary data from 304 farmers across two survey rounds, we find significant ITT and LATE treatment effects on reducing the disease outbreak as well as increasing revenue and profit, though the financial estimates are weaker evidence than the disease estimates: they sit at the margin of what our sample can detect. While these effects do not differ by human capital indicators of education, experience, and technical knowledge, the recorded data reveals strong association between education and stability of dissolved oxygen (DO) over crop cycles but not experience nor technical knowledge. Further, DO instability is associated with smaller shrimp size, and greater water stress is associated with lower harvest volume and smaller shrimp size. Our findings show that average farmers indeed benefit from even "complex" high-frequency digital information, and while the mechanism is not confirmed, the important role of education in water quality maintenance is suggested.