Adoption and Intensity of Adoption of Conservation Farming Practices in Zambia

This paper contributes to literature on agricultural technology adoption by using a novel data set that combines data from two large-scale household surveys with historical rainfall data to understand the determinants and the intensity of adoption of Conservation Farming (CF)practices in Zambia. Conservation agriculture (CA), defined as practicing minimum soil disturbance, cover crops and crop rotation, has the technical potential to contribute to food security and adaptation to climate change. It has been actively promoted in seven of Zambia’s nine provinces since the 1980s in the form of CF including planting basins and dry season land preparation in addition to the 3 CA practices. Rigorous analyses of the determinants of adoption/dis-adoption of these practices, however, are still scarce. This paper fills this gap using panel data from two rounds of the Supplemental Survey to the Central Statistical Office’s 1999/2000 Post Harvest Surveys, which were implemented in 2004 and 2008, as well as (district level) historical rainfall estimate (RFE) data obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center (NOAA-CPC) for the period of 1996-2011.