The scale of Kenya’s varietal stagnation is striking. On-farm, the area-weighted average age of maize hybrids stands at 18 years; at the point of sale, it is 20 years. Some hybrids have remained in cultivation for 15, 20, even 30 years, even though roughly 16 new hybrids are licensed annually through Kenya’s National Performance Trials and about 25 hybrids released within the past decade are available through agro-dealers. Newer varieties, bred for shifting rainfall patterns, more frequent drought, and emerging pests and diseases, have shown higher yields both in trials and in farmers’ own fields, with recent evidence indicating newer hybrids out-yield older ones by up to 147 kilograms per hectare in the long rains season.

Why do farmers stick with the familiar? The researchers emphasize that the preference is not irrational. Older hybrids often carry traits farmers genuinely value, including preferred grain taste and texture, better storability for household food security, and stover quality for livestock. Risk aversion, long-standing beliefs, liquidity pressures, and seed availability constraints all reinforce the status quo. But the team identified one binding constraint that has received little empirical attention: the near-total absence of independent, credible, up-to-date information on how commercially available hybrids actually perform under real farming conditions. Unlike in many high-income countries, where publicly funded variety trials guide seed selection, no equivalent system exists in most of Africa, leaving seed companies to market their products largely unchallenged. Popular varieties persist as cash cows, dominating market share for decades because companies need to recoup investments, not because they outperform.

To test whether credible data could break this pattern, the researchers intercepted 1,194 farmers, 46 percent of them women, at 36 agro-dealer shops in five towns just before the 2024 long rains planting season. Only farmers intending to buy at least two 2-kilogram bags of certified seed were enrolled, a threshold designed to exclude opportunistic free-riders while retaining genuine smallholder buyers. All participants received a voucher for a free 2-kilogram bag of maize seed, redeemable only at that shop, along with a message encouraging experimentation on a small portion of their land. The voucher covered roughly 40 percent of the seed farmers planned to plant that season.

The randomization was deliberately simple: predefined serial numbers fed into handheld tablets assigned farmers alternately to treatment and comparison groups. Both groups then received a placebo-style engagement, but for the treatment group this was replaced with a laminated chart showing farmer-reported yields for ten commercially available hybrids grown in their county during the 2023 long rains. The chart listed four columns: product name, years since release, county average yield, and the average yield of the top 25 percent of farmers. Enumerators reviewed the charts with farmers but did not let them take copies home, minimizing spillovers. Crucially, the data was brand-agnostic and promotional in no way; farmers were simply shown how products already on the market had performed for their neighbors.

The effects on stated intentions were dramatic. Only 7 percent of comparison farmers said they intended to use their voucher on one of the top two performers, compared with 25 percent of treatment farmers, an increase of 19 percentage points, or 271 percent above the baseline. Purchase uncertainty also fell sharply: while 5 percent of comparison farmers did not know what to buy, only 2 percent of treatment farmers were undecided. Overall, 62 percent of comparison farmers intended to buy a listed product versus 76 percent of treatment farmers. Demand for unlisted products fell correspondingly, from 35 percent among comparison farmers to 20 percent among treatment farmers.

Actual purchases told a slightly attenuated but still powerful story. Voucher redemption was nearly universal, with only about 2 percent of farmers in either group failing to buy seed, mostly because their desired variety was out of stock. Among those who redeemed, 5 percent of comparison farmers bought a top-two product compared with 11 percent of treatment farmers, a 135 percent increase over baseline. Stockouts clearly constrained the full effect: 25 percent of treatment farmers had intended to buy a top performer, but only 11 percent managed to do so. Comparison farmers, by contrast, shifted upward from their stated intentions inside the shop, likely steered by agro-dealer recommendations, while treatment farmers held closer to their informed choices.

Two additional findings strengthen the case. First, the information genuinely pushed farmers toward experimentation rather than simply subsidizing familiar choices. While 24 percent of comparison farmers intended to use the voucher on a product outside their original purchasing plan, 40 percent of treatment farmers did so, and virtually no comparison farmers planned to use the voucher on a variety different from their general seed purchases, compared with 11 percent of treatment farmers. Second, and unexpectedly, the effect spilled over into unassisted purchasing: treatment farmers were significantly more likely to buy a top-two hybrid with their own money for their main seed needs, rising from 6 to about 9 percent, and were more likely to switch from their original plans to top performers. The researchers caution that this exploratory result warrants further study, but it suggests performance information may reshape preferences more broadly than subsidized experimentation alone.

Farmers themselves rated the information highly. Ninety-five percent found it easy to understand, 91 percent considered it trustworthy, and 99 percent called it useful for seed selection. Half of treatment farmers singled out the top-25-percent yield column as the most meaningful, while 40 percent valued the county average and only 10 percent prioritized product age. Challenges were modest: 13 percent found it hard to differentiate between products and 9 percent struggled to choose from the list, hinting that clearer visual aids or more tailored presentation could help a minority of users. Notably, treatment farmers cited agro-dealer influence less often than comparison farmers, suggesting the data reduced reliance on shop-floor persuasion.

The authors are careful about the limits of their findings. Because both groups received the voucher, the results capture the marginal effect of information conditional on partial liquidity relief, not the effect of information alone. The sample comprised farmers buying certified seed from formal agro-dealers, so conclusions may not extend to the informal and intermediate seed systems where many smallholders operate. Agro-dealer interactions with comparison farmers and stockouts likely compressed the measured gaps, meaning the estimates are conservative lower bounds on the true informational effect. Still, the policy implications are clear: an independent, sustained system for evaluating and disseminating varietal performance could shift seed markets from branding-driven to quality-driven competition, provided testing reflects real smallholder conditions, data covers farmer-relevant traits such as drought tolerance and maturity, and supply chains can actually stock the varieties farmers come asking for. The question, the study concludes, is no longer whether farmers can use performance information to choose better seed, but whether the institutional infrastructure to deliver that information at scale can be built and sustained.

Subject of Research: The effect of independent varietal performance information on maize seed choices among smallholder farmers in Kenya

Article Title: Does varietal performance information drive better seed choices? Experimental evidence from Kenya

Article References: Ndegwa, M. K., Bulinda, C. M., Kariuki, S., Donovan, J., Rutsaert, P., & Jaleta, M. (2026). Does varietal performance information drive better seed choices? Experimental evidence from Kenya. Journal of Agriculture and Food Research, 31, Article 103334. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jafr.2026.103334

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: maize, seed choice, varietal turnover, Kenya, randomized controlled trial, yield performance data, smallholder farmers, agro-dealers, seed systems, information intervention, hybrid varieties, agricultural economics

The study, titled Firm Turnover Under Asymmetric Information: Tanzania’s Agro-dealer Sector, was led by corresponding author Alix Naugler, who conducted the research as a master’s student in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at Illinois and is now pursuing a doctoral degree in applied economics and management at Cornell University. She worked alongside co-authors Hope Michelson, professor of agricultural and consumer economics at Illinois, Sarah Janzen, an associate professor in the same department, and Christopher Magomba, a professor at the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania. The team draws on a decade of field research in Morogoro, during which Michelson’s group has repeatedly surveyed agro-dealers, sampled and tested their fertilizer, and gathered detailed information on soil quality, farmer production systems, and farmer perceptions of agricultural inputs.

The starting point for the research is a well-established puzzle in development economics. Agricultural inputs are what economists call experience goods: their quality cannot be verified at the moment of purchase, and only reveals itself after use. For fertilizer, the lag is especially long, because the plant’s agronomic response to application becomes observable only over time, sometimes several months after the product has been bought and spread on a field. In markets characterized by such information asymmetries, economists have shown that consumers tend to rely heavily on the reputation and trustworthiness of sellers as a proxy for the unobservable quality of the product. Michelson explains that in these settings, the identity and continuity of the seller matter enormously, because a farmer has little else to go on when deciding whether a bag of fertilizer contains the nutrients it claims to contain.

Herein lies the puzzle that motivated the study. A common perception among smallholder farmers in Tanzania, as in other parts of the world, is that fertilizer for sale in local markets is of bad quality, missing important nutrients that lower its agronomic effectiveness. Yet independent testing across multiple studies and laboratories shows that fertilizer sold in the region is consistently of good quality. The mismatch between belief and measured reality is not a minor footnote; it is a persistent and important challenge for both policy and research, because farmers who distrust the product on offer will rationally choose not to buy it, depressing adoption rates even when the underlying supply chain is delivering exactly what it promises.

Over years of returning to the same markets, the Illinois team noticed something unusual: agro-dealers were exiting the market at a striking rate, higher than other small businesses operating in the same region. That observation prompted a systematic investigation. Naugler set out to document the rates of agro-dealer turnover and to benchmark them against what is observed among micro and small enterprises in other developing countries, to understand the drivers and motivations behind the high entry and exit rates, and to explore whether a systematic relationship exists between agro-dealer turnover and farmer beliefs about fertilizer quality in these markets. Field work in Tanzania was conducted with local collaborators, and the researchers traveled across the region to speak with farmers and agro-dealers, supplementing in-person visits with phone surveys of agro-dealers already in the team’s database from previous studies.

The numbers the team documented are remarkable. Annual agro-dealer entry rates in the study region reached 33 percent, while exit rates reached 17 percent. Both figures are more than double the typical turnover rates for non-agricultural micro and small enterprises in low-income countries. In practical terms, roughly one in three local input shops is new in any given year, and one in six disappears. For a market in which trust is the primary currency, that level of churn is not a neutral background condition; it is a structural feature that continuously resets the relationships between sellers and the farmers they serve.

Why are so many shops opening and closing? One plausible hypothesis was that agro-dealers enter the market only when they have no better options and exit when a new opportunity arises, treating the business as a backup strategy for earning income. The survey data showed something very different. Janzen describes the agro-dealers in the sample as optimistic entrepreneurs: they are educated and trained in the agricultural sector, and they enter with the intent to operate for the long run. They want to sell agricultural inputs to smallholder farmers. But strong competition is driving them to exit at high rates. In other words, the churn is not a symptom of half-hearted commitment; it is the outcome of intense rivalry among serious, well-prepared business owners competing for a limited customer base.

The connection between this turnover and farmer beliefs emerged clearly from the survey scenarios the researchers designed. They asked each farmer to rate the agricultural input quality of their current agro-dealer, and then asked about the expected quality of a hypothetical new market entrant. The results reveal a sharp asymmetry. Farmers who usually purchase agricultural inputs from the same agro-dealer have an established relationship and trust that seller. However, those same farmers expect new market entrants to provide lower-quality agricultural inputs. Trust, in this market, is specific to the individual seller and does not transfer to newcomers, no matter how qualified they may be.

Even more counterintuitive is what farmers believe happens when an agro-dealer exits. The researchers found that when dealers leave the market, farmers expect overall fertilizer quality in that market to improve. The interpretation offered by the team is that farmers believe bad agro-dealers, meaning suppliers of low-quality products, are the ones leaving. This belief persists in spite of the research showing that there are no bad agro-dealers in the sense of selling bad fertilizer; laboratory testing has repeatedly confirmed the products are sound. But the incorrect perceptions among farmers continue to persist and evolve, fed by the visible dynamics of the marketplace rather than by the invisible chemistry of the fertilizer itself. As Michelson notes, farmers cannot observe fertilizer quality at the point of purchase, so they use the information they observe in their own markets about agro-dealer operations to inform their beliefs about quality, and this has consequences for which agricultural inputs they choose to purchase and adopt.

The findings point toward an important but often overlooked role for agro-dealers in the agricultural development landscape. These businesses are not merely retail outlets; they also provide information and guidance for farmers, complementing the efforts of government extension services that are under-resourced and over-extended. Agro-dealers share agricultural information with farmers, including which brands to use and how to apply the product. Naugler concludes that ensuring these businesses are financially sound, and that they have the technical expertise to serve farmers locally, can ultimately strengthen agricultural productivity in the region. The policy implication is subtle but significant: interventions aimed at raising fertilizer adoption may need to look beyond product certification and pricing, and instead address the stability and continuity of the retail relationships through which farmers learn to trust what they buy. In a market where quality is invisible until months after purchase, keeping trusted sellers in business may be as important as keeping bad fertilizer off the shelves, especially when the evidence suggests bad fertilizer was never there to begin with.

Subject of Research: The relationship between agro-dealer market turnover and smallholder farmer fertilizer quality perceptions and adoption in Tanzania

Article Title: How high turnover rates in Tanzania’s agro-dealer sector affect farmer fertilizer adoption

Article References: How high turnover rates in Tanzania’s agro-dealer sector affect farmer fertilizer adoption. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: agro-dealers, fertilizer adoption, Tanzania, smallholder farmers, information asymmetry, market turnover, agricultural economics, Morogoro, product quality perceptions, sub-Saharan Africa, trust, American Journal of Agricultural Economics