Adoption and Impact of Row Planting of Wheat Crop on Household Livelihood: - A Case Study of Duna Woreda in Hadiya Zone, Ethiopia.

Abstract

Wheat is the most widely consumed grain in Ethiopia for thousands of years. Even though it is popularly consumed cereal, productivity is reported to be low. Consequently, Ethiopia̓s Ministry of Agriculture together with its partners introduced provision of extension service of row planting with the application of recommended agricultural inputs in recent years to improve wheat productivity, agricultural imput expenditure, food consumption expenditure and small-scale farmers’ income. This study was conducted to assess the adoption and impact of row planting of wheat on household income in Duna Woreda using cross-sectional data obtained from 187 wheat farmers selected from four kebeles to represent major wheat producers. The study used a binary logistic regression model to identify factors affecting adoption of row planting of wheat and propensity score matching to assess the impact of row planting on wheat crop yield, household food consumption expenditure, household agricultural imput expenditure and household income. The results indicated that age of household head, the level of education, family size of a household head, size of cultivated land, livestock possession, utilization of credit and extension services significantly improved adoption of row planting of the wheat crop. The propensity score matching showed adoption of row planting of wheat has a robust and positive effect on farmers’ wheat crop yield, food consumption expenditure, agricultural input expenditure and income per year. The average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) was 6079.56 Ethiopian Birr net income, 5244.75 Ethiopian Birr net food consumption expenditure, 4486.52 Ethiopian Birr net agricultural input expenditure and about 4.93 quintals yield-per-hectare increase for adopters as compared to non-adopters which indicate that efforts to disseminate existing row planting of wheat will highly contribute to increasing income among farm households.