Harnessing digital technology to improve agricultural productivity?

Can improving access to mobile extension improve agricultural productivity? Recent evidence suggests both significant and insignificant ways in which SMS-based agricultural information could affect farming outcomes. It is unclear if variations in the programs' design or the methodological chall...

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Autor principal:	Arjunan Subramanian
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021
Materias:	Medicine R Science Q
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/cfc3f496396b4ec19aa28eefa7eef06b
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:cfc3f496396b4ec19aa28eefa7eef06b2021-12-02T20:09:55ZHarnessing digital technology to improve agricultural productivity?1932-620310.1371/journal.pone.0253377https://doaj.org/article/cfc3f496396b4ec19aa28eefa7eef06b2021-01-01T00:00:00Zhttps://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253377https://doaj.org/toc/1932-6203Can improving access to mobile extension improve agricultural productivity? Recent evidence suggests both significant and insignificant ways in which SMS-based agricultural information could affect farming outcomes. It is unclear if variations in the programs' design or the methodological challenges in evaluating the programs cause wide-ranging impacts. Extension hotline services provide rapid, unambiguous information by agricultural experts over the phone, tailored to time- and crop-specific shocks. Using methods from experimental economics, we randomly distributed the hotline number to generate exogenous variation in the access to farming information. We conducted our study among 300 farmers in the South Indian state of Karnataka. Our results show that eliminating informational inefficiencies increases farmers' average yields for a high-stakes pigeon pea crop that faced adverse aggregate shock. The impact on the yield is through the adoption of cost-effective and improved farming practices. However, we do not observe any effect on the crops that were not affected by the shock. Our findings reveal that advisory recommendations customized to time- and crop-specific shocks are associated with a greater impact on agricultural productivity.Arjunan SubramanianPublic Library of Science (PLoS)articleMedicineRScienceQENPLoS ONE, Vol 16, Iss 6, p e0253377 (2021)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	Medicine R Science Q
spellingShingle	Medicine R Science Q Arjunan Subramanian Harnessing digital technology to improve agricultural productivity?
description	Can improving access to mobile extension improve agricultural productivity? Recent evidence suggests both significant and insignificant ways in which SMS-based agricultural information could affect farming outcomes. It is unclear if variations in the programs' design or the methodological challenges in evaluating the programs cause wide-ranging impacts. Extension hotline services provide rapid, unambiguous information by agricultural experts over the phone, tailored to time- and crop-specific shocks. Using methods from experimental economics, we randomly distributed the hotline number to generate exogenous variation in the access to farming information. We conducted our study among 300 farmers in the South Indian state of Karnataka. Our results show that eliminating informational inefficiencies increases farmers' average yields for a high-stakes pigeon pea crop that faced adverse aggregate shock. The impact on the yield is through the adoption of cost-effective and improved farming practices. However, we do not observe any effect on the crops that were not affected by the shock. Our findings reveal that advisory recommendations customized to time- and crop-specific shocks are associated with a greater impact on agricultural productivity.
format	article
author	Arjunan Subramanian
author_facet	Arjunan Subramanian
author_sort	Arjunan Subramanian
title	Harnessing digital technology to improve agricultural productivity?
title_short	Harnessing digital technology to improve agricultural productivity?
title_full	Harnessing digital technology to improve agricultural productivity?
title_fullStr	Harnessing digital technology to improve agricultural productivity?
title_full_unstemmed	Harnessing digital technology to improve agricultural productivity?
title_sort	harnessing digital technology to improve agricultural productivity?
publisher	Public Library of Science (PLoS)
publishDate	2021
url	https://doaj.org/article/cfc3f496396b4ec19aa28eefa7eef06b
work_keys_str_mv	AT arjunansubramanian harnessingdigitaltechnologytoimproveagriculturalproductivity
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Harnessing digital technology to improve agricultural productivity?

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