Estimating the Implicit Value of Crop Stubble as a Barrier to Technology Adoption in Morocco

For mixed cereal-livestock farmers, cereal production provides a bundle of goods. Grain is consumed by the household or sold at market, and crop residues are used as livestock feed. The straw component of crop residue can be bought and sold at market and therefore has a well-established local market price. Crop stubble, the portion of the crop residue left on the ground, is generally not traded and therefore has no market price. Some agricultural technologies require farmers to forgo using crop stubble as feed, and cultivation of high value crops entails sacrificing residue production altogether. In this paper we apply a structural econometric model to household data from Morocco to estimate the implicit value of crop stubble. We use a sample splitting technique to investigate differences in the value of this resource and find that it is significantly higher for smaller farmers, who therefore face an even larger barrier to technology adoption.