Why do farmers innovate and why don't they innovate more?
In: Waters-Bayer, Ann and Reij, Chris (eds.) 201
Farmer Innovation in Africa. (pp 92-103).
Earthscan Publications Ltd, London, UK
ISBN 1-85383-816-0
Why do farmers innovate, - why don't they innovate more?
Introduction
Why are some farmers more innovative than others? Is it because they have access to more resources than other farmers? Or, is it because a lack of resources forces them to be innovative? Could it be that some farmers are more curious than others and enjoy playing around with new things? Is gender important, i.e. are female-headed households less innovative than male-headed households? Are educated farmers more innovative than non-educated ones?
There are many reasons to seek answers to these types of questions: They can provide academic insight into the how's and why's of development. It has also been argued that we have a moral obligation to ensure a long overdue recognition of poor farmers' role in development. And from a practitioner's point of view, the answers can guide interventions to support farmer's innovations.
Before trying to explain the variation in farmers' innovations, it would make sense to see how much the level of innovative activities varies between farms. Maybe the variation is so small that it is not really an issue. I say maybe, because it turns out that despite an impressive number of publications on farmer innovations, basic information like this is still missing. A few other authors have realised this peculiar situation, e.g. Sumberg and Okali (1997) characterises the situation as one where the same anecdotal evidence is cited again and again without sufficient basic research being done.
The prominence of anecdotal evidence can be explained easily. First of all the realisation that farmers innovate stems from individual contacts, e.g. a project employee or a field researcher gets to know an innovative farmer and then documents his/her activities. This evidence is by its very nature anecdotal when the contact is not a result of random sampling. Secondly, a resistance to acknowledging farmers' innovative capacity has meant that it has hitherto been more important to show that farmers innovate, than to collect statistically sound data.
A problem with this way of collecting information is that farmers who really stand out from the majority are easily noticed, leading to the risk that documentation of farmers' innovativeness paint a misleading picture.
"Anecdotal" has a negative connotation, and it may be better to talk about case studies. Case studies have many advantages when one wants to understand the inner workings of the innovation process, but problems arise when wanting to extrapolate the findings. What does, for instance, a case study of a farmer's innovations in irrigation tell about the innovative activities in the area? Nothing really, unless we know something about innovative activities among farmers in general.
This chapter is about a study that aims at getting a more general overview of farmer innovations in East Africa. Basic information about farmer innovations was collected from more than five-hundred farmers. Each farmer was interviewed for one hour and some farmers were visited several times.
It should be a good complement to case studies of farmer innovations, like the ones found throughout this book. This study therefore, is not a replacement for case studies but an addition.
Collecting basic information on farmer innovations turns out to be more difficult than it at first sounds. The problem is that basic concepts like the definition of an innovation is not clear or widely agreed upon. Every researcher, therefore, has to come up with his/her own working definition.
The consequence of this is that the research methodology has a major impact on the findings. It is not an unusual situation but too often underestimated. To allow for a better understanding of the findings presented in this chapter - and some of the limitations of the study - important aspects of the research methodology will be discussed in the next section before the findings are presented.
Methodology
What is an innovation
A prerequisite for collecting information on farmer innovations is knowledge on what an innovation is. As mentioned above, there is no generally agreed-upon definition among researchers. Also, legislation on patents and copyright provides no rigid or universal definition of innovations. Besides that, what are farmers' definitions of innovations?
In the four language areas covered in this study it turned out that there were no single words from everyday language that could be used to identify innovations consistently.
The solution chosen for this study was to define an agricultural innovation as "a new thing or method used in agriculture". To establish a common reference point for discussing innovations with farmers in the four language areas an "introductory speech" was developed. After several revisions and testing the following "speech" was found to work well:
'An innovation is something new. For example it can be a new maize variety, composting, use of new tools, line planting instead of broadcasting or a new combination of crops. Some innovations come from outside like chemical fertiliser, while others are developed by farmers themselves, like herbicide made from local plants. We are interested in both innovations that you have made yourself and innovations that you got from elsewhere. We also call it an innovation if you try new planting times, or change the spacing of crops compared to what you used to do. So an innovation is anything new brought into your farm.'(A number of guide questions followed, e.g. "What have you done to improve your farm over the last one year?"; "Did you try new ways of land preparation?"; "Did you try new times of planting?")
The field testing included a translation from English to the local language by one translator and a back-translation by another translator. In this way many distortions of meaning caused by words that have almost - but not completely - the same meaning in different languages, could be captured.
Who identifies an innovation?
Defining an innovation as "something new" leads to another question, namely "new to whom"? For instance a farmer may experiment with early planting without knowing that other farmers in the area have done similar experiments.
This study focuses on innovations from a farmer perspective, so it was decided that what is new to the farmer being interviewed qualifies as an innovation.
Study sites
This research was carried out in collaboration with the African Highlands Initiative (AHI) which limited the initial choice of sites to the nine benchmark sites in East Africa, where AHI is operational. Fortunately each benchmark site covers an area sufficiently large to avoid that researchers step on each other's toes but small enough to make comparison of data meaningful.
The research design included one primary site for in-depth research, and two secondary sites for testing to what extent findings from the primary research site are valid elsewhere.
The primary research site was in Western Kenya (Vihiga, Siaya, Kakamega and Butere/Mumias Districts) and the secondary sites were in Central Kenya (Embu District) and in the Usambara Mountains (Lushoto District) in Tanzania.
Western Kenya was traditionally a bread basket, but high population growth has turned the area into a labour reserve. Typically only women, children and old people live permanently on a farm while the able-bodied males work in towns elsewhere in the country. Agricultural practices, crops and animals are often traditional and the use of modern inputs is minimal. Market access and availability of agricultural services is poor. Exactly 221 farmers were sampled in a 20 x 20 km area that covers two major ethnic groups, the Luo and the Luhya. A grid sample plan was used. A further 103 farmers were sampled from five villages - one at each corner of the 20 x 20 km area and one village in the centre of the area.
The site in Central Kenya is on the slopes of Mt. Kenya. The area has high agricultural potential with fertile soils, sufficient water - partly from streams - and farms sufficiently large to support the families. The use of modern inputs is high compared to Western Kenya, and market access is good. The standard of living is high compared to Western Kenya. Forty households were interviewed.
The site in the Usambara Mts. contrasts in that it is relatively is isolated. Soil degradation is also a problem, and the standard of living is low. Despite this, a pattern of male out-migration as in Western Kenya, has not emerged. Forty-two households in one village were interviewed.
What innovations?
The 505 interviewed farmers listed a total of 1614 innovations during the last twelve months (see Figure 1). New crops - often new varieties of crops already cultivated by the farmers - composed the most common type of innovation by a large margin (44.3% of all innovations). It is interesting to note that particularly in Western Kenya, what farmers called new crops varieties were in some cases traditional varieties that were being revived. A case in point is maize: HYV maize has been popular for many years, but the declining economy and removal of subsidies has forced many farmers to move back to low-input systems where traditional varieties perform better than HYV.
Soil fertility improvements such as the application of manure and compost accounted for less than twenty percent. Trading in manure was observed at the three sites but in Tanzania in particular the importance of manure was mentioned often.
All the innovations mentioned are in fact optimisations and minor changes to existing systems and practices. The farmers who introduced new animal species in their farming systems for the first time probably brought on the greatest diversion from their past practices. However, since they to a large extent copied the practices of neighbouring farmers, this can hardly be termed radical innovations. It is a wise strategy for reducing risks and it should not be forgotten that thousands of minor changes can over time lead to considerable changes.
Variations in innovativeness
Some writers assume that a small minority of farmers are actively innovating and that the majority just copy the successful innovations from the innovative farmers. If that were to be the case, then we would expect that most of the 1614 innovations recorded in this study would be carried out by a fraction of the 505 households. However, looking at the distribution of innovations in Figure 2, it is clear that practically every household is innovating.
The variation is much smaller than most observers would expect. However, there is some variation - with innovations per household ranging from zero to ten over twelve months - so let us see how that can be explained.
Figure 2 No. of innovations by no. of household over the last twelve months.
Explaining innovations - the emic view
In anthropology, a distinction is made between the view from outside - the etic view, and the view from within - the emic view. Case studies usually capture the actors' point of view, i.e., they have an emic approach. Surveys are often used to get an etic view. For instance, a survey may be used to measure the statistical correlation between education and the use of computers without asking the surveyed people about their opinions.
Both approaches have their merits and can be used to reveal different types of information. In this study, only an emic approach can reveal what motivates farmers to innovate, and what they see as major obstacles to innovations. However, an etic approach may reveal the importance of factors that are not easily observable to the individual farmer, like the relationship between innovativeness and gender, age, distance to services, etc.
In the following sections an emic view - i.e., farmers' view - on the reason for innovation and obstacles to innovations is presented. After that follows sections that explore the importance of gender and tribe using an etic approach.
Why innovate?
For each innovation that farmers listed, they were interviewed about the reason for the innovation. The 2028 reasons that were recorded have been categorised in Figure 3. The provision of food for their own consumption was the main reason behind innovations, closely followed by innovations aimed at increasing the household income and measures to increase/maintain soil fertility.
Interestingly only six innovations were undertaken out of curiosity without any particular goal in mind. In other words, curiosity experiments do not appear to be very common.
| Reason for innovation (N=2028) | % of N |
|---|---|
| Own consumption/food security | 17% |
| For sale | 13% |
| Increase/maintain yield | 13% |
| Increase/maintain soil fertility | 9% |
| Adaptation to soils | 5% |
| To cure/prevent animal diseases | 5% |
| Fast growth | 5% |
| Erosion control | 5% |
| Preservation during storage | 4% |
| Provision of fodder | 3% |
| Pest/disease/weed control in plants | 3% |
| Easy weeding | 3% |
| Improve/maintain milk production | 1% |
| Lack of land/improve use of land | 1% |
| Drought resistance | 1% |
| Good taste | 1% |
| Other reasons | 10% |
| To test its performance/to try out | 0.3% |
| 10% |
Why not innovate more?
The farmers were asked to list all obstacles they faced in trying to innovate and then to rank them using a traditional Bao game. The scores are weighted so that each farmer has an equal say in the combined scores shown in Figure 4.
Many farmers explained that they had particular innovations in mind with which they would like to experiment, but only lack of money prevented them from going ahead. Other farmers stated that they had the money to buy what they needed to undertake new innovations but simply lacked the land for the experiments.
Theft was considered a problem everywhere. It was not unusual to hear about a farmer who had planted new seeds or seedlings only to find them stolen or destroyed during the night.
Particularly in Western Kenya, it is common to find farms managed by women while the men come home for a visit once or twice a year. Some of these women told that they were eager to undertake various innovations but could not go ahead before their absent husbands had approved.
It is interesting to notice that lack of ideas and knowledge of new things to experiment with was mentioned by many farmers and got a score of more than ten percent.
Explaining innovations - the etic view
A number of factors that are assumed to influence the number of innovations at the household level were included in this study, like the level of education, size of household, available land, age of head of household, and contact with other areas. Interestingly none of the factors were mentioned by farmers, indicating that an etic approach can give insights an emic approach does not capture.
Let's take a look at some of the factors and see how they correlate with the level of innovations.
Gender
In total, 211 out of the 505 households studied were headed by women. In cases where the man was working elsewhere the household was considered to be female-headed if the woman was the major decision maker. Female-headed households are particularly common in Western Kenya where many men work outside the area and just return a few times a year to the farm.
Gender is often assumed to be of major importance, but in this study is was found that there was no statistically significant difference in the number of innovations carried out by either male or female-headed households. Actually, the female-headed households had an average of 3.3 innovations during the previous twelve months while the male headed had 3.1 innovations, but with a probability of 0.297959 (t-test) the difference is far from significant.
Size of farm
It was expected that farm size would be correlated to innovativeness for a number of reasons. For instance, owners of big farms are often rich, have access to more resources - including information - and can better afford failed experiments. However, no correlation between farm size and innovativeness was found Pearson r -0.04, p=0.391798).
Secretive innovators
Farmers were asked to imagine that they had developed a method for making better compost. They were then asked if they would share their new knowledge with other farmers. Most farmers said they would share their knowledge, but the ones who did not want to share were the most innovative farmers (4.8 versus 3.1 innovations over the last twelve months, t-test, p=0.(0)1470)
Off-farm income
The effect of farmers having off-farm income is difficult to predict. On one hand they have less time for farming and may consider farming less important. But, on the other hand they probably have more access to information and resources than farmers who work full-time on their farms.
In this study it was found that farmers with off-farm income are more innovative than others (4.1 versus 3.6 innovations over the last twelve months, t-test, p=0.025232).
Age
As expected, the level of innovation drops as the head of household gets older. However, the drop is not great until farmers are in their late sixties. The peak occurs among farmers aged thirty-five to forty.
Tribe
The most controversial finding is that the strongest correlation exists between tribe and innovativeness (see Figure 5) (for all four tribes included in the study: 1 way Anova F: 69.3, p=0.(0)(0)(0)).
Let us take a detailed look at Western Kenya where the primary study was carried out in a 20 x 20 km area covering both Luo and Luhya areas.
| Tribe | No. of innovations in the last 12 months | Households |
|---|---|---|
| Luo (W. Kenya) | 2.6 | 269 |
| Luhya (W. Kenya) | 4.7 | 155 |
How can the big difference be explained? First of all it is worth considering if methodological problems caused the differences:
The two tribes have very different languages, requiring different field assistants to work in the two areas and they may not have been equally thorough in their work. However, several field assistants were used in both areas, so we would expect also to find difference within the Luo and Luhya areas respectively correlating with the different field assistants. However, no such differences were found.
In Figure 6, the green areas are those settled by Luo farmers and the yellow, orange and red areas by Luhya farmers.
Figure 6 Spatial variation in innovativeness in Western Kenya (Large version: GIF 188KB PNG 164KB ).
The findings were taken back to farmers, extension staff and researchers working in the area to get some explanations. Everybody agreed that the findings were in line with their own observations.
Several explanations focused on the remnants of the cultural systems regarding age-groups. The Luo society was traditionally organised according to age groups. Each age-group carried certain rights and obligations. Today, this system survives to the extent that young family members are discouraged from doing things that have not been done by older brothers or relatives. Many stories were told of young Luo farmers who wanted to develop their farms but did not dare to go ahead and advance further than their older brothers. Other people told of Luo men who had made it rich in Nairobi and elsewhere and now wanted to develop farms back in Luo-land but could not do so because they would surpass their older brothers achievements. Some of them have instead bought big farms in the Rift Valley and elsewhere while they maintain their small traditional farm in Luo-land.
The Luhya farmers do not experience similar restrictions.
Other explanations focused on the attitude to agriculture. Many Luo farmers told how they consider farming to be a last option of which they were not very proud. Education and work carried out elsewhere is the preferred option which would only be abandoned if it failed, after which one would go back to farming. In contrast Luhya farmers were proud of their farms and did not consider farming to be inferior.
Conclusion
Many case studies have shown that some farmers do indeed experiment in very creative ways. The study presented here tries to go further in order to see the general picture, i.e. what is the typical innovative behaviour instead of focusing on a few outstanding experimenting farmers.
Almost every household innovates and there was no group of farmers who stood out for their experimentation. The innovations were numerous but all reflected minor changes and the optimisation of existing practices. This makes sense for poor farmers as it reduces risk.
Innovations out of curiosity were shown to take place, but were very rare. Innovations were generally undertaken with the goal of improving the standard of living or well being in a particular way.
This research focused on the reasons behind farmers' innovations and the obstacles they face. Farmers find lack of money a major constraint but also lack information about new things with which to experiment. Theft is a problem every innovator is facing. In the morning, they may find their new crops uprooted or their animals stolen.
Female-headed households are very common today, as men often work elsewhere because farming can no longer sustain the family. Some women find it constraining that they have to wait for their husband's approval for new initiatives - particular if he is only visiting once or twice a year as it is often the case.
Interestingly, female-headed households were found to be just as innovative as the male-headed ones.
The size of the farms did not correlate with the number of innovations.
When farmers get older they become less innovative but throughout most of their productive life, the level of innovation is fairly constant.
Surprisingly, tribe was found to be the factor that showed the highest correlation with level of innovativeness. Farmers, extension staff and researchers from the area explained this finding as being caused by remnants of old social systems and different attitudes to farming.