The research team, led by scientists at Gulu University and Kabale University, set out to answer three linked questions: what determines whether a farmer is aware of the maize grades and standards promoted by the East African Grain Council and the Uganda National Bureau of Standards; what determines whether an aware farmer actually adopts them; and what determines how intensively an adopter applies them to the harvest. Because these are sequential decisions rather than a single choice, the researchers needed a statistical framework that could account for the fact that only a subset of farmers ever reaches the adoption stage. Their solution was a two-pronged econometric approach combining probit regression with the Heckman two-stage selection model, a technique designed to correct for the bias that arises when the sample of adopters is not randomly drawn from the population.

The study area was deliberately chosen for its commercial importance. Amuru and Nwoya districts, located in the Acholi subregion along the Gulu–Arua road, are among Uganda’s most productive maize zones, with Amuru contributing an estimated 45,000 to 55,000 metric tons of maize annually and Nwoya producing between 50,000 and 60,000 metric tons. Both districts sit near the South Sudan border, a gateway for agricultural exports, and both are dominated by small-scale farming despite their considerable potential for large-scale production. Using multistage sampling, the researchers purposively selected the two districts, randomly chose Amuru and Alero sub-counties, and then drew a random sample of 270 maize farmers from lists supplied by district agricultural officers. The sample size was calculated with the Cochran formula, and data were collected between April and May 2023 through a pretested questionnaire administered by trained enumerators.

The headline numbers are striking. Only 40.4 percent of the farmers surveyed were aware of the recommended maize grades and standards, and just 31.1 percent actually used them. Among the farmers who did adopt grading, the mean proportion of their total maize output that was graded stood at 0.86, but the range was enormous, stretching from a minimum of 0.02 to a maximum of 4.41, reflecting wide variability in how extensively individual adopters engaged with the practice. Awareness was measured using eight Likert-type items capturing farmers’ knowledge of the grades recommended by the East African Community, with a composite score threshold used to classify farmers as aware or unaware. The internal consistency of the awareness scale, assessed with Cronbach’s alpha, was 0.71, indicating adequate reliability for the composite measure.

To unpack awareness, the researchers ran a probit regression in which the dependent variable was binary and the explanatory variables included education, age, gender, market access, extension contact, credit access and farmer-group membership. The results showed that each additional year of schooling raised the probability of awareness by 1.6 percent, a modest but statistically significant effect that echoes a large body of literature linking formal education to the uptake of agricultural innovations. Far more powerful was access to extension services: farmers with extension contact were 24.4 percent more likely to be aware of maize standards than farmers without it. Gender also mattered, with male farmers 12.2 percent more likely to know about the standards than female farmers, and access to credit raised awareness by 13.2 percent, presumably because financial resources allow farmers to explore practices that can enhance productivity. Membership in farmers’ associations was positively associated with awareness as well, confirming the role of collective institutions as channels for information diffusion.

The second stage of the analysis examined utilization. Farmers who were aware of the grading system were significantly more likely to apply it, underscoring the intuitive but policy-relevant point that knowledge is a precondition for adoption. Access to extension services again increased the likelihood of utilization, reinforcing the central role of advisory agents in translating standards into practice. Somewhat counterintuitively, the study found a negative and significant relationship between membership in farmers’ associations and adoption. The authors suggest that group dynamics, divergent member interests, limited collective knowledge or weak market demand for graded maize may discourage adoption within associations. Distance to the nearest maize market was also a significant factor, with farmers located closer to markets more likely to grade their maize, likely because reduced transport costs and easier buyer contact make compliance more attractive. Notably, distance to market, credit access and extension access were included only in the selection equation and excluded from the intensity equation, satisfying the exclusion restriction that allows the Heckman model to be identified beyond functional form.

The third stage modeled intensity of use among adopters, defined as the share of total maize output that was graded rather than the absolute quantity, a refinement the researchers adopted to avoid overstating intensity for larger producers. Here the significant and negative inverse Mills ratio confirmed that unobserved factors influencing the decision to adopt are correlated with those influencing intensity, validating the Heckman framework over alternatives such as the Tobit or double-hurdle models. The Tobit approach treats zero outcomes as corner solutions of a continuous process, but in this setting a zero means genuine non-utilization, a qualitatively different state. The double-hurdle model typically assumes independent error terms across the two decisions, whereas the Heckman model explicitly allows unobserved factors to be correlated and tests this through the Mills ratio. The intensity results showed that household size, land size under maize production and awareness were all positively associated with the share of output graded, while the effect of age was negative, meaning younger farmers graded a larger share of their harvest. Larger households supply the labor needed for the time-consuming sorting process, while larger landholdings allow fixed grading costs to be spread over greater volumes and signal more commercially oriented producers facing stronger market incentives.

The stakes of this knowledge gap are not abstract. Uganda exports roughly 22 percent of its annual maize harvest, with the rest consumed domestically, about 60 percent processed into flour, 37 percent used for animal feed and 3 percent for brewing. The trade is organized around informal buyers with no quality controls, large local traders who supply millers, Kenyan large-scale traders offering competitive prices, and institutional buyers such as the World Food Programme. Regional standards, harmonized by the East African Community with particular emphasis on aflatoxin monitoring, are meant to ensure consistency and food safety, but compliance in domestic markets remains inadequate. The consequences have been concrete and costly: in 2018, Kenya rejected more than 600,000 metric tons of Ugandan maize over high aflatoxin levels, and a further import ban affecting Ugandan and Tanzanian maize followed in 2021 for similar reasons. Such rejections depress farmer incomes, choke off export earnings and generate significant postharvest losses, making the low awareness and utilization documented in this study a matter of national economic concern rather than a narrow technical problem.

The authors are candid about the limitations of their work. The cross-sectional design, with data collected at a single point in time, restricts causal inference, and the focus on Amuru and Nwoya may limit how far the findings generalize to regions with different agricultural practices or economic contexts. They call for comparative analyses across diverse regions of Uganda and similar settings to capture regional variation and inform more tailored policy. Still, the practical implications are clear. The study recommends integrating maize-grading training into agricultural advisory programs, prioritizing younger farmers and larger-scale producers as early adopters and demonstration sites to accelerate diffusion through peer networks, scaling up tailored credit schemes so farmers can invest in the equipment and practices needed to meet standards, and establishing grading stations closer to farming communities to mitigate the logistical barriers associated with market distance. Given that association membership boosted awareness but not adoption, the authors also urge capacity building within farmer groups to address internal challenges and stimulate real demand for graded maize.

What emerges from the analysis is a coherent picture of a sequential decision pipeline in which information, institutions and economics each gate the next step. Education, extension, credit and gender equity determine who even knows the standards exist; awareness and proximity to buyers determine who acts on that knowledge; and household labor, land size and age determine how thoroughly adopters grade their grain. Breaking the pipeline at any stage suppresses quality compliance downstream, and the study suggests that fixing it requires coordinated interventions across all three stages rather than any single lever. For a country whose maize competes in regional markets where a single aflatoxin rejection can erase hundreds of thousands of tons of sales, helping smallholder farmers climb this decision ladder may be one of the most economically consequential investments agricultural policy can make.

Subject of Research: Determinants of smallholder farmers' awareness, adoption and intensity of use of maize grades and standards in northern Uganda, analyzed with a Heckman two-stage model.

Article Title: Determinants of awareness and intensity of use of maize grades and standards among smallholder farmers in Northern Uganda: a heckman two-stage model approach

Article References: Kalu, O. N., Adewale, C. I., Okello, D. M., & Mugonola, B. (2026). Determinants of awareness and intensity of use of maize grades and standards among smallholder farmers in Northern Uganda: a heckman two-stage model approach. BMC Agriculture, 2(1), Article 13. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44399-026-00035-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44399-026-00035-z

Keywords: maize, smallholder farmers, Uganda, grades and standards, Heckman two-stage model, adoption, awareness, intensity of use, extension services, market access, aflatoxin, agricultural economics

The research team, led by Edward Afum Banahene and Enoch Kwame Tham-Agyekum of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, with collaborators at the University of Pretoria, Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere University of Agriculture and Technology, the University of Cape Coast, and the Malawi University of Science and Technology, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: which communication channels actually move farmers from awareness to action? Climate variability in Ghana—erratic rainfall, prolonged dry spells, and progressive soil degradation—continues to undermine agricultural productivity and food security. Climate-resilient agricultural practices, ranging from drought-tolerant and early-maturing crop varieties to intercropping, conservation tillage, agroforestry, organic manure application, rainwater harvesting, cover cropping, and the use of weather forecasts, have been promoted for years. Yet adoption remains low and inconsistent, despite growing policy support.

The researchers argue that the bottleneck is not the existence of technologies but the communication mechanisms that carry knowledge of them. Farmers must be aware of a practice, understand how it works, and trust the source before they will implement it. Drawing on Diffusion of Innovations theory and the framework of Agricultural Knowledge and Information Systems, the team compared multiple pathways within a single analytical framework: face-to-face extension, community radio, digital platforms and social media, mobile-based services, cooperatives and farmer organizations, peer learning networks, farmer field schools, demonstration plots, agricultural shows, participatory video, community theater, and village knowledge-sharing platforms. Crucially, they combined farmers’ perceptions of trust, accessibility, credibility, and convenience with measurable behavioral outcomes, and used multivariate statistics to control for socio-economic factors such as education, gender, farm size, income, and extension contact.

Methodologically, the study employed a descriptive, quantitative design. From a population of roughly 40,000 smallholder farmers in the municipality, a sample of 396 was drawn using Yamane’s formula at a 95 percent confidence level and a 5 percent margin of error. Two-stage sampling first purposively identified communities cultivating climate-sensitive crops, then randomly selected farmers from lists supplied by the Ministry of Agriculture and farmer-based organizations. Structured questionnaires with Likert-scale items were administered face-to-face in December 2025, with reliability confirmed by Cronbach’s alpha values between 0.78 and 0.81 across the constructs of accessibility, relevance, effectiveness, and trust. Ethical clearance was granted by KNUST’s Humanities and Social Sciences Research Ethics Committee, and participation was voluntary and anonymized.

The results paint a vivid picture of a communication landscape in which social embeddedness trumps broadcast reach. Cooperatives and farmer organizations emerged as the most frequently used pathway, with a mean usage score of 3.92 on a five-point scale, followed closely by community radio (3.77), digital platforms and social media (3.73), peer learning networks (3.73), and farmer-to-farmer communication (3.60). But frequency of use is not the same as influence. Spearman rank correlation analysis revealed that peer learning networks and farmer-to-farmer communication exhibited the strongest positive and statistically significant associations with nearly every climate-resilient practice measured. Peer learning networks correlated at 0.756 with intercropping, 0.714 with conservation tillage, 0.523 with organic manure application, and 0.479 with the use of climate information. Farmer-to-farmer communication showed similarly strong associations with intercropping (0.630), conservation tillage (0.606), mulching (0.565), and cover cropping (0.440).

These correlations, the authors argue, reflect the mechanics of social learning. Peer exchange allows direct observation of outcomes, experimentation, and feedback, reducing the uncertainty that surrounds new practices. Trust, shared norms, and cumulative experience shape decision-making in ways that one-way broadcasts cannot. Climate-resilient farming, in this view, is not a solitary undertaking but a collective one, embedded in social systems. Extension strategies that institutionalize peer-based learning—lead farmers, farmer champions, group-based experimentation—are therefore more likely to achieve sustainable and scalable resilience than top-down information delivery.

The study’s regression analysis added a socio-economic dimension. Farmer group membership significantly predicted the use of agricultural shows and exhibitions (β = 0.315, p < 0.05), community theater (β = 0.338, p < 0.05), and participatory video (β = 0.423, p < 0.05), suggesting that organized groups act as gateways to collective, experiential communication formats. Engagement in off-farm income activities significantly predicted farmer-to-farmer communication (β = 0.309, p < 0.05), indicating that time-constrained farmers gravitate toward fast, trusted peer exchanges rather than formal training sessions. Intriguingly, education, age, gender, farm size, and income were largely insignificant predictors of pathway use, hinting that in this setting, social dynamics matter more than individual human capital. A possible substitution effect also surfaced: farmers with frequent extension contact showed marginally lower use of community radio and digital media, suggesting imperfect integration between formal and informal information systems.

Not every finding flattered conventional wisdom. Farmer field schools and demonstration plots—long staples of agricultural extension—displayed significant negative correlations with adoption, including −0.327 for intercropping and −0.297 for conservation tillage. The authors attribute this to poor contextualization, infrequent delivery, didactic teaching styles, and time lags before benefits materialize. NGO and donor-funded groups showed weak negative effects, and climate adaptation networks were largely ineffective, likely lacking visibility, structure, and sustained engagement. Community radio, digital and social media, and participatory video showed low or insignificant correlations with actual adoption, reinforcing the argument that while mass media excels at awareness creation, it lacks the interactivity and specificity required for behavioral change. Mobile-based services occupied a middle ground, with moderate but consistent positive correlations, particularly with drought-tolerant varieties (0.161) and climate information use (0.212), positioning them as valuable tools for the knowledge and early decision stages of adoption.

Perception data reinforced the hierarchy of trust. Extension officers were the most trusted information actors (mean 4.25), followed by farmer networks and cooperatives (3.84), while trust in mobile applications (3.02) and social media (3.22) remained moderate—evidence that exposure does not automatically breed confidence. Farmers rated information clarity highly (4.05) and peer-to-peer interaction as especially effective for knowledge transfer (4.07), but field demonstrations (2.01) and climate adaptation networks (1.96) scored lowest, pointing to weak institutional embedding rather than intrinsic ineffectiveness. The study also identified barriers to adoption using Kendall’s coefficient of concordance, which confirmed significant consensus among respondents. Risk aversion and fear of yield loss ranked as the most critical constraint (mean rank 3.66), followed by lack of access to accurate and timely climate information, low education and technical knowledge, labor and financial constraints, distrust in information sources, and land tenure insecurity. Notably, language barriers ranked least significant, suggesting that most information in Techiman is already delivered in familiar local dialects.

The implications extend well beyond Ghana. The authors recommend scaling peer learning platforms, integrating timely and localized climate information into channels farmers already trust, developing visual, stepwise communication materials, providing financial and labor support mechanisms such as collective labor schemes and staggered input repayment, and delivering advice through credible local actors including opinion leaders and farmer representatives. They caution that the cross-sectional design limits causal inference and that self-reported data may carry recall and social desirability bias. Still, the central message is clear and potentially transformative for adaptation policy across Africa: psychological and informational barriers outweigh structural ones, and the most powerful communication technology in climate-smart agriculture may not be a smartphone or a radio transmitter at all, but the trusted voice of a fellow farmer standing at the edge of a demonstration field, describing what actually worked.

Subject of Research: The relationship between communication pathways and smallholder farmers' adoption of climate-resilient agricultural practices in Techiman Municipality, Ghana.

Article Title: Talking climate, growing change: communication pathways and farmer adoption of resilient practices in Techiman, Ghana

Article References: Talking climate, growing change: communication pathways and farmer adoption of resilient practices in Techiman, Ghana. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-026-01136-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13412-026-01136-6

Keywords: climate-resilient agriculture, communication pathways, smallholder farmers, peer learning, Ghana, adoption, agricultural extension, climate information, farmer organizations, diffusion of innovations, Techiman, risk aversion

The findings arrive against a sobering backdrop. Ethiopia loses an estimated two billion tons of soil every year to erosion, roughly half of it from cultivated land, and the country’s average annual soil loss of about 30 tons per hectare far outpaces the estimated soil formation rate of 10 tons per hectare per year. In the Lake Hawassa watershed specifically, previous research has measured losses of around 37 tons per hectare per year, feeding silt into a lake whose water quality and ecosystem have visibly declined. More than half of the land in sub-Saharan Africa is considered too degraded or infertile for reliable crop production, and Ethiopia’s highlands, where most of the population and livestock are concentrated, sit at the epicenter of the crisis.

Ethiopia has responded with one of the longest-running conservation programs in Africa. Institutionalized soil and water conservation began about half a century ago, initially delivered through food-for-work schemes in the 1970s and 1980s that paid grain to farmers in drought-prone areas for building soil bunds and Fanya juu terraces. These structures are technically simple: a channel roughly 50 centimeters deep and wide is dug along the contour, with excavated soil piled downslope to form a bund, or upslope in the case of Fanya juu, creating a barrier that intercepts runoff. Yet early experience showed that technology introduced through incentives struggled to survive once the payments stopped, because participation was tied to the reward rather than to conviction. In recent decades, nationwide mass-mobilization campaigns, sustainable land management programs, the Productive Safety Net Programme, and non-governmental organizations have pushed conservation onto farmland at remarkable scale.

In the three study districts, known locally as kebeles, that scale is measurable: the district agriculture office reported that 1,138 kilometers of soil bunds and 389 kilometers of Fanya juu were constructed between 2018 and 2025 through various schemes. The researchers classified households as adopters, whose structures remained functional over five years; dis-adopters, whose bunds had been dismantled, overtaken by sediment, or allowed to collapse; and non-adopters, with no structures built in at least five years. Of the adopters, about 72 percent said the measures on their land were built through public campaigns, coordinated by local government and relying on free communal labor for roughly 30 days each year, while fewer than 9 percent attributed construction to paid projects. Nearly three-quarters of adopters had invested their own or their family’s labor in the construction, a factor the authors link to stronger stewardship of the finished structures.

The survey results expose a sharp divide in how farmers perceive the problem itself. About 82 percent of all respondents had observed soil erosion on their farmland in the past decade, describing rills cutting through maize fields, exposed plant roots, thinning topsoil, and shrinking harvests. More than 65 percent of adopters strongly agreed that erosion reduces soil fertility, soil depth, and crop yield. But among dis-adopters, nearly half strongly disagreed with those statements, a blind spot the researchers suggest may partly explain why they abandoned the structures. Erosion in its least visible form, sheet flow that peels away soil more or less evenly, is easy to underestimate, and farmers on flatter land were the least likely to perceive any threat at all: 74 percent of non-adopters rated erosion on their fields as negligible to slight, against only 8 percent of adopters.

When the researchers ran a multinomial logistic regression on the socioeconomic variables, three factors emerged as statistically significant drivers of adoption. Each additional hectare of farmland nearly tripled the odds of adoption, with an odds ratio of 2.93, an effect the authors attribute to the fact that bunds occupy between 2 and 20 percent of cultivable area depending on slope, a painful sacrifice for farmers with tiny plots. Livestock holdings, measured in tropical livestock units as a proxy for household wealth, also raised the odds of adoption significantly. Most striking was perceived erosion severity, which multiplied the odds of adoption by 3.48. Farmers who see the damage are the ones who keep the barriers standing. By contrast, education, land certificates, credit access, off-farm income, and even participation in conservation training had no significant effect, likely because public campaigns and project labor delivered structures to households regardless of these characteristics.

Dis-adoption told its own statistical story. The probability of abandoning conservation structures rose with the age of the household head, increasing by roughly 9 percent per year of age, an effect consistent with the physical demands of maintenance. Bunds require continuous repair: sediment accumulates, runoff breaches the risers, and cultivation too close to the structure causes collapse. Larger families, greater livestock holdings, and stronger perception of erosion all significantly reduced the likelihood of dis-adoption, pointing to labor availability and economic capacity as the decisive resources. Where family labor is scarce or diverted to other farming tasks, smallholders cannot afford the upkeep, and the structures decay. The authors also flag a subtler institutional problem: because most bunds are built with free campaign labor or external funding, farmers who contributed little to construction feel little obligation to maintain them, expecting that outside help will return.

The perception gap extends to the benefits. More than 80 percent of adopters agreed that the measures control runoff, improve soil fertility and moisture, boost fodder and grass supply, and raise crop yields. Yet after years of promotion and awareness campaigns, around 40 percent of dis-adopters and nearly a third of non-adopters still disputed these benefits, a skepticism the researchers connect to the slow, incremental way bunds improve soil. Among non-adopters, 30 percent said their land was not eroding enough to warrant structures, and 36 percent objected that bunds consume scarce cultivable land. Labor shortages were cited by 22 percent. Encouragingly, some resistance is pragmatic rather than stubborn: about a third of dis-adopters and non-adopters protect their fields with traditional cutoff drains and planting instead, and roughly 48 percent of dis-adopters said they intend to rebuild their structures, citing erosion control and land productivity.

The study’s conclusions carry weight well beyond one Ethiopian watershed. Physical conservation structures are expensive and labor-hungry, and where their survival depends on annual mass mobilization rather than farmer ownership, the investment is at risk of evaporating one broken bund at a time. The authors argue that sustainable management will require locally agreed bylaws and extension monitoring to enforce repair, alongside planning that accounts for the specific socioeconomic profiles of households, the age of farmers, the size of their plots, and the depth of their perception of erosion. With the pressure on land intensifying as fallow periods shrink and marginal slopes are cultivated, and with climate change delivering longer dry spells punctuated by intense rainfall, the window for keeping Ethiopia’s soil on its fields is narrowing. The evidence from Lake Hawassa suggests that the cheapest insurance for these landscapes is not another campaign, but farmers convinced enough, and resourced enough, to maintain what has already been built.

Subject of Research: Adoption and dis-adoption of physical soil and water conservation measures by smallholder farmers in the Ethiopian Rift Valley

Article Title: Physical soil and water conservation measures in the Rift Valley area of Ethiopia: adoption and management challenges

Article References: Wolka, K., Daniel, K., & Gesesse, G. (2026). Physical soil and water conservation measures in the Rift Valley area of Ethiopia: adoption and management challenges. Environmental Challenges, Article 101656. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envc.2026.101656

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.envc.2026.101656

Keywords: soil erosion, soil and water conservation, Ethiopia, Lake Hawassa, soil bunds, Fanya juu, adoption, dis-adoption, land degradation, smallholder farmers, Rift Valley, watershed management