The impact of row planting of teff crop on rural Household income: A case of Tahtay Maychew wereda, Tigrai, Ethiopia

Abstract

Adoption of yield increasing technologies is seen as a key driver to increase agricultural production in Ethiopia. There is, however, a lack of empirical evidence on the impact of programs aiming to scale-up the adoption of improved technologies from research settings to the farm level. To fill this gap, this paper assesses the impact of the row planting technology specifically teff crop on farm household income in Tahtay Maychew wereda Tigrai regional state. Both descriptive and econometric data analysis techniques were applied. The analysis was based on primary household level cross sectional data collected from 300 randomly selected rural households of which 120 of them were participants and the remaining 180 were nonparticipants and secondary data were employed. We applied the propensity Score Matching (PSM) and Heckman two stage selection model. The results of a propensity score matching show that the adoption of row planting had increased the teff crop income by about 1062.667 Birr per year for NNM, which is significant at 5% probability level, 1077.854 birr per year for SM which is significant at 1% probability level, 1004.172 birr per year for KM which is significant at 1% probability level and 1959.602 birr per year for RM which is significant at 1% probability level, on average compared to the non-adopters. In the first stage of the Heckman two-step procedure six variables were found to determine participation in row planting technology. After the selectivity bias is controlled by the model in the second stage the inverse Mills ratio (LAMBDA) variables and other three variables were found to have significantly determined household teff crop income.