From lab to land: perceptions and impacts of scaling up the adoption of row planting to teff farmers in Ethiopia

This paper provides more detailed insight into the social and economic dimensions of the teff variant of the systems of rice intensification (SRI) that is widely promoted in Ethiopia. Based primarily on experiment station trials, the large-scale public extension campaign to promote the uptake of the row planting technology in teff production has already become a major public policy thrust of the Government of Ethiopia. The paper is an impact assessment of the ‘pre-scale-up’ phase of this government program and provides rigorous evaluation-based insights on teff farmers’ productivity benefits, perceptions, and returns with row planting under real-world conditions at the farm level. The results highlight the problems in implementation of the program and of its recommendations, methodological issues, and likely overoptimism on the potential of row planting in real farm settings. This calls for the need of a more careful assessment of on-farm constraints towards adoption before the design and widespread implementation of the promotion campaigns for improved agricultural technologies. This work has resulted in a series of IFPRI working papers (here and here) that are in the publication pipeline. This presentation speaks to both the nature of political agronomy and the importance of evidence in support of new agronomy.status: publishe