Adoption of Awasi-cross Sheep Breed and its Impact on Household Income in Ethiopia

The study was conducted in Ethiopia to assess the impact of Awassi cross breed, which is introduced by scaling out project five years ago, on household income. Generalized propensity score technique was used to estimate the effect of producing Awasi cross sheep breed on household income. Results indicated that from nine explanatory variables included in econometric model three variables were found to significantly influence intensity of Awasi cross breed production. These include total land holding, total income from crop production and labor availability. The Dose Response functions (DRFs) for the outcome variable, income from sell of sheep, is statistically significant for all values of the treatments except from 48 onwards. The average probability of income from sheep increases from 47674.49 Eth. Birr for a farmer having one Awasi cross breed and expected to increase to 63230.54 Eth. However, the number of Awasi cross breed beyond 47 does not increase income significantly. Generally, Awassi cross breed sheep serves as important source of better income compared to local. Therefore, introducing Awasi crossbreed to similar agro ecologies will have paramount effect to improve farmers income in the crop livestock mixed farming system through scaling out.