Cost-benefit analysis across smallholder rice farmers reveals that existing fertilization practices severely compromise their income

Abstract

Modernizing agricultural practices of smallholder farmers can increase considerably global food produce. Smallholder farmers are, nevertheless, often unwilling to adopt practices unfamiliar to them. Increases in the cost of fertilizers, can nonetheless render existing practices unsustainable, raising concerns of food injustice. We addressed here the potential to which we can increase yield through popularizing existing best practice agricultural approaches. We worked over a network of 40 smallholder farmers in the Danxia Mountain region, Guangdong province, China. We divided them into two crop-rotation treatments and gave them the freedom to implement agricultural management practices the way they usually do. We subsequently clustered them into three groups based on the management history. Over the final growth season, on which the clustering was based, there was an over 30% increase in crop yield between the most and the least efficient clusters. More importantly we show that the use of fertilizers not only did not promote rice production but it also had adverse effects. We finally present a cost-benefit analysis. Through familiarizing of the smallholder farmers existing management practices, policy makers could make integrating new farming guidelines easier to adopt than purely dishing out modern farming practice recommendations. We thus propose that any attempts to transition agricultural practices should involve the extensive monitoring of existing practices at the very beginning. This should effectively close existing yield gaps in relation to industrial farmers.