The Role of Agricultural Training on Fertilizer Use Knowledge: A Randomized Controlled Experiment

Dan Pan and Ning Zhang

Ecological Economics, 2018, vol. 148, issue C, 77-91

Abstract: Improving farmers' knowledge of fertilizer use through agricultural training has been considered a prerequisite to scientific fertilizer management. However, empirical evidence of the effect of agricultural training on farmers' fertilizer management knowledge is inconclusive. Based on a randomized controlled experiment involving 687 farmers that mitigates selection bias in the data, this paper identifies the treatment effect of agricultural training on farmers' fertilizer management knowledge in Chinese rice production. Results indicate that the fertilizer management knowledge of field-guidance farmers improved by almost 40%. However, such knowledge acquisition did not occur for curriculum-trained farmers. We also find that there is no evidence of knowledge diffusion from trained farmers to exposed farmers in the same village.

Keywords: Agricultural training; Fertilizer management; Knowledge; Randomized controlled experiment; Treatment effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800917309801
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:ecolec:v:148:y:2018:i:c:p:77-91

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2018.02.004

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().