Abstract:
Adoption of yield increasing technologies is seen as a key driver to increase agricultural production in
Ethiopia. There is, however, limited empirical evidence on the adoption and impacts of improved crop
varieties grown by smallholders. The existing studies on improved crop variety adoption and impacts
mainly rely on farmers’ report in identifying crop varieties which is subject to error due to several factors
among which farmers might not have complete information about the varieties they grow. To overcome
this challenge, in this study we used DNA fingerprinting technique to accurately identify wheat varieties
that farmers grow and then evaluate the role of using improved varieties on wheat yield. Varietal and plot
level information were collected from 1421 randomly selected wheat plots from the major wheat growing
regional states of Ethiopia. In quantifying the productivity impacts of improved varieties, Propensity
Score matching method was used to empirically assess the impact of IWVs’ adoption on wheat
productivity using DNA fingerprinting data. According to farmers’ recall method in variety identification,
only 55.03% of the sample farmers used IWVs’ during the study year. However, using DNA fingerprinting
method, 73.61% of the respondents were using IWVs’. The discrepancy between the two approaches show
that relying on household survey methods in varietal identification underestimates improved crop variety
adoption rates. According to household recall Kakaba is the most popular variety and had used by 7.18%
of farmers; however, contradict to this, the result of DNA finger printing showed that Kubsa is most
popular wheat variety and had used by 26.11% of the farmers. The study results further show that the
mean productivity of the varieties is high for high genetic purity of varieties grown. The result of both
farmers’ recall and DNA fingerprinting data further showed that farmer’s dependence on and adopted
limited number of IWVs’ in Ethiopia. On average, the adoption of IWVs’ enhances wheat yield by
418.51Kg/ha. The policy implication of the findings is that accurate varietal level data collection is
essential in estimating adoption rates and associated productivity impacts of research and extension
services in crop variety development and promotion.
