Nigerian farmers have been slow in adopting improved seeds due to constraints in both supply and demand. Demand-side constraints pertain to farmers’ characteristics, while supply-side constraints are related to capacity. Farmers’ seed demand is complex, and empirical information on...

Despite recent studies on improved seed varieties estimating the adoption rates of maize in 1998 at 40 percent (Manyong et al. 2000) and rice at 60 percent (Larsson 2005), true adoption rates appear to be unknown. This knowledge gap exists due to the ambiguity surrounding what constitutes...

Small-scale private irrigation (SPRI) schemes make up most of the irrigated area in Nigeria, although they constitute only about three percent of the cultivated area in the country. Farmers' demand for SPRI is potentially affected by diverse sets of agroecological, socioeconomic and risk...

Small-scale private irrigation schemes (SPRI) have been the driving force behind the expansion of irrigated areas in Nigeria, despite government efforts to promote large-scale public irrigation schemes. SPRI allows adjustment of irrigation schedules in accordance with observed crop needs. The...

This article empirically assesses the effect of unobserved transaction costs for Nigerian farmers when investing in irrigation pumps. The unobserved stochastic threshold (UST) model popularly used in labor economics literature is applied, and is compared with two models, the Tobit and the...

While there is growing evidence of the impact of targeted subsidies on private input demand, as far as we are aware no empirical studies have examined the spillover effects of targeted subsidies for just one input on the use of other complementary inputs with which there is low substitutability....

Low fertilizer use is professed to be among the many reasons for low agricultural productivity in Nigeria. Fertilizer application, estimated at 13 kg/ha in 2009 by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, is far lower than the 200 kg/ha recommended by the United Nations Food...