Impact of Text Messages in Nudging Farmers to Use Mobile Phone Application for Farming Decisions

Farmers across the developing nations often resort to sub optimal decision-making regarding farming activities due to lack of credible and relevant information. In this context, as a medium and source of information dissemination, the role of smartphone and mobile phone application (MPA) have been growing across the world. By conducting a randomised control trial among 1006 farmers across 14 villages of Andhra Pradesh state in India, in this article, we test the impact of an intervention of sending text messages in nudging the farmer into using an agriculture MPA. The results show that text messages are effective in nudging farmers to adopt and access the MPA, but not in sustained usage of MPA. To sustain farmers interest in the agriculture MPA, additional policy interventions such as improving relevance, credibility and accuracy of MPA and increasing educated youth participation in agriculture are required