EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The effect of soil quality on fertilizer use rates among smallholder farmers in western Kenya

Paswel Phiri Marenya and Christopher Barrett

No 51671, 2009 Conference, August 16-22, 2009, Beijing, China from International Association of Agricultural Economists

Abstract: Studies of fertilizer use in sub-Saharan Africa have been dominated by analyses of economic and market factors having to do with infrastructure, institutions, and incentives that prevent or foster increased fertilizer demand, largely ignoring how soil fertility status conditions farmer demand for fertilizer. We apply a switching regression model to data from 260 farm households in western Kenya in order to allow for the possibility of discontinuities in fertilizer demand based on a soil carbon content (SCC) threshold. We find that the usual factors reflecting liquidity and quasi-fixed inputs are important on high-SCC plots but not on those with poorer soils. External inputs become less effective on soils with low SCC, hence the discernible shift in behaviors across soil quality regimes. For many farmers, improved fertilizer market conditions alone may be insufficient to stimulate increased fertilizer use without complementary improvements in the biophysical conditions that affect conditional factor demand.

Keywords: Agricultural and Food Policy; Crop Production/Industries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (78)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/51671/files/IA ... r%20No.%20417%20.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:iaae09:51671

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.51671

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2009 Conference, August 16-22, 2009, Beijing, China from International Association of Agricultural Economists Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search (aesearch@umn.edu).

 
Page updated 2025-01-07
Handle: RePEc:ags:iaae09:51671