Conservation agriculture among smallholders in Mozambique: A matched cohort analysis of causal estimands

Abstract

Conservation agriculture (CA) has been an important part of development in many developed countries, especially as a solution to increase food production among smallholder farmers. This study focuses on the impact of CA on smallholder household wellbeing. It uses survey data representing groups of CA adopters and CA non-adopter in the Tete and Barue regions, Mozambique. The study uses several matching estimators to account for the differences in household wellbeing using similar observable characteristics among farmers' households. The propensity score matching method with variant options was used to obtain matched observations of CA adopters and non-adopters. The coarsened exact matching method was also used to account for the impact.

In terms of impact, CA adopters realized higher wellbeing indices on asset index and house construction index than they would have had if they had not adopted CA. However, there is no difference between CA adopters and non-adopters in terms of the animal index. The reason attributed to this insignificance maybe because of the residue retention requiring farmers to leave crop residue on farms to retain soil moisture instead of feeding livestock with the plant residues.

This study recommends increased efforts of ongoing CA extension in the area of study.