The scale of Ghana’s cocoa economy makes the findings significant far beyond the farm gate. Around 71 percent of the world’s cocoa is grown in West Africa, with Ghana the second largest producer after Côte d’Ivoire. An estimated 800,000 Ghanaian farmers cultivate cocoa on plots typically smaller than five hectares, and the crop contributes roughly 22 percent of the country’s agricultural GDP, employs about 45 percent of the population, and accounts for nearly half of all export earnings. Yet productivity per hectare has barely improved over the past decade. Historic gains in national output have come mostly from clearing more land, not from growing more beans per hectare, a pattern repeated across the region.

The technical picture behind stagnant yields is well understood. Continuous cropping has depleted soil organic matter, and yields between individual farms vary enormously, from roughly 100 to more than 1,000 kilograms per hectare, with agronomic management a major determinant of the gap. Surveys of soils in Ghana’s cocoa districts reveal low organic matter and low pH, consistent with a boom-bust cycle in which cultivation mines the soil of nutrients. Chemical fertilisers, the default remedy, bring problems of their own: they acidify soils, reducing the availability and uptake of nutrients, they can pollute surface waters, and their price puts the quantities farmers actually need beyond their reach. Most of the surveyed farmers relied on subsidised fertiliser from the Ghana Cocoa Board, but complained that supplies were inadequate and arrived late.

Organic amendments offer a technically elegant alternative. Compost supplies plant nutrients, rebuilds soil organic matter, improves structure, boosts microbial activity, and can even suppress nematode pests in cocoa farms. Biochar, produced by burning organic material in the absence of oxygen through pyrolysis, is a highly recalcitrant form of carbon that improves soil structure, increases water-holding capacity, and alleviates the soil acidity that chemical fertilisers worsen. Crucially, both can be made from cocoa pod husks, the fibrous shells left behind after the beans are extracted, which pile up on farms as waste. The husks are rich in phosphorus and potassium, and studies in Nigeria have shown that pod-husk fertiliser can lower costs and raise revenues on cocoa farms. Composting the husks has also been shown to suppress the Phytophthora pathogen responsible for black pod disease.

To find out why farmers were not exploiting this resource, researchers from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana, and the University of Reading surveyed 150 farmers randomly drawn from a population of 245 across five cocoa districts representing four soil types and all five major agroecological cocoa regions of Ghana. The districts, Aiyinase, Assin Foso, Dadiesoaba, Kade, and Nyarkrom, were selected using a soil map to ensure that Ferralsols, Lixisols, Nitosols, and Acrisols were all represented, since amendments may perform differently on different soils. A follow-up focus group of eight experienced farmers and cooperative leaders helped interpret the survey answers. The team is careful to note that participants were all already working with Cocoa Extension Agents, so the results describe engaged farmers rather than the most isolated growers.

The demographic profile that emerged is one of experienced but ageing farmers under real economic pressure. Respondents averaged 51 years old, with 16 years of cocoa experience on average, and three quarters had additional income sources, mostly petty trading, because cocoa alone could not sustain their households. One farmer told the focus group bluntly that the money from cocoa was inadequate for his family to survive a year. About 67 percent of farmers reported that soil fertility had declined over the years, and 92 percent said they could identify poor soil by signs such as unhealthy leaves, wilted pods, small beans, and falling yields. Yet when asked about organic amendments, only 6 percent had ever used any, and those cases turned out to be poultry manure, not compost or biochar.

The awareness gap was stark and, in places, almost comic. Nearly half the farmers had heard of compost, but overwhelmingly as a technique for growing vegetables, not cocoa, a legacy of alternative-livelihood training programmes run by COCOBOD and NGOs. Only 12.7 percent of those aware of compost knew how to make it. Biochar fared far worse: 97.4 percent had never heard of it, and none had any knowledge of how to prepare it. What makes the result remarkable is what happened when the concept was explained. Ninety-six percent of farmers unfamiliar with compost said they were willing to learn to make it, and 76 percent were willing to buy it, quoting an average price of 26.33 Ghana Cedis for a 25-kilogram bag. For biochar, 96 percent were willing to learn and 77 percent willing to buy. As one farmer put it, there is no market in Ghana where organic fertiliser can be purchased at all, even though national demand is estimated at 0.7 million tonnes per year and could rise to 2.7 million tonnes.

The study also uncovered a dangerous misconception. Farmers feared that spreading cocoa pod husks on their fields would spread disease, a worry echoed by official guidance from the Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana that discouraged using the husks as compost. The scientific literature says the opposite: composting the husks suppresses Phytophthora and reduces black pod incidence. Farmers ranked the bulkiness of organic fertiliser, the labour needed to apply it, and transport costs as their biggest obstacles, constraints that fall hardest on older farmers and on women and migrants with less secure access to family labour. The researchers also caution that biochar is not a universal fix, since it works best on acidic, infertile soils and can depress growth on neutral soils, meaning soil testing should precede any application.

The path forward, the authors argue, already exists in Ghana’s institutional landscape. Nearly 95 percent of surveyed farmers belonged to cooperatives, 93 percent received regular visits from extension agents, and a COCOBOD pruning initiative achieved adoption rates near 99 percent when machines were supplied through cooperatives. Embedding compost and biochar training in the same channels, alongside certification schemes such as Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade and licensed buying companies, could replicate that success. With more than three quarters of farmers ready to buy amendments that nobody currently sells, the researchers see a clear opening for entrepreneurs to produce and distribute compost and biochar as a service, potentially supported by COCOBOD subsidies and the government’s One District One Factory policy. The raw material is free, the demand is proven, and the only thing missing, it turns out, is the message.

Subject of Research: Awareness and adoption of compost and biochar soil amendments among Ghanaian cocoa farmers

Article Title: Limited awareness prevents the use of compost and biochar as soil amendments by Ghanaian cocoa farmers

Article References: Awunyo-Vitor, D., Daymond, A., Quaye, A., Awudzi, G. K., Atuah, L., Mwafulirwa, L., Hammond, J., Turnbull, C., Lahive, F., Coole, S., Robinson, S., Hadley, P., & Sizmur, T. (2026). Limited awareness prevents the use of compost and biochar as soil amendments by Ghanaian cocoa farmers. Discover Agriculture, 4(1), Article 273. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44279-026-00754-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44279-026-00754-6

Keywords: cocoa farming, Ghana, compost, biochar, soil amendments, soil fertility, cocoa pod husks, smallholder farmers, agricultural extension, pyrolysis, sustainable agriculture, COCOBOD

The research, published in Discover Agriculture, was led by John Atsu Agbolosoo of IPB University in Indonesia together with Collins Yeboah Asiedu of Ghana Cocoa Board, Dick Chune Midamba and Mary Kwesiga of Gulu University, Stephen Opoku-Mensah of Kumasi Technical University, and Benjamin Sarfo of Akenten Appiah Menka University. The team surveyed 241 smallholder cocoa farmers in the Dodi Papase area of Ghana’s Kadjebi District during the 2023/2024 crop year, drawing participants from Cocoa Health and Extension Division registers of farmers who had already carried out at least one rehabilitation activity. Their central insight is deceptively simple but methodologically consequential: farmers do not treat the four main rehabilitation techniques as mutually exclusive menu items. Instead, they mix, match, and sequence coppicing, phased replanting, planting seedlings under old trees, and complete replanting in ways that reflect their resources, constraints, and risk tolerances.

Previous studies, most of them conducted in Nigeria, typically analyzed rehabilitation decisions one technique at a time, using single-equation logit or probit models that treat each choice as independent. The authors of the new work argue that this approach can produce biased or inefficient estimates because the latent factors driving one decision, such as managerial skill, risk appetite, or informal information networks, often spill over into others. To capture that interdependence, they estimated a multivariate probit model, a framework that models four binary outcomes simultaneously and allows the unobserved error terms to be correlated through a full variance-covariance matrix. A likelihood ratio test of joint independence decisively rejected the null hypothesis, with a chi-squared statistic of 28.33 on six degrees of freedom and a p-value below 0.01, confirming that the four decisions are statistically linked and that the joint model is warranted.

The correlation structure itself proved revealing. The strongest positive association appeared between coppicing and complete replanting, with an estimated correlation coefficient of 0.589, followed by phased replanting and complete replanting at 0.510, both significant at the one percent level. Phased replanting and planting under old trees showed a moderate positive correlation of 0.330. By contrast, the link between planting under old trees and complete replanting, at 0.171, was not statistically significant, hinting that these two strategies may respond to different unobserved drivers. The authors caution that these correlations reflect associations among unobserved determinants rather than causal complementarities, but they nonetheless paint a picture of farmers weighing strategies within a shared decision framework shaped by labor, liquidity, and information.

Adoption patterns were strikingly uneven. Coppicing, the practice of cutting mature trees back to stumps to stimulate fresh shoots while preserving shade cover and soil stability, was the most popular choice, practiced by 58 percent of surveyed farmers. Planting seedlings under aging trees, an interplanting approach that allows households to keep earning from old stands while hybrids mature, followed at 53 percent. Phased replanting, which renews plots section by section to smooth income losses, was used by 44 percent, while complete replanting, the most capital and labor intensive option suitable for severely degraded farms, trailed at 37 percent. Most tellingly, only about 12 percent of farmers adopted all four practices, and just 2 percent adopted none, indicating that selective combinations rather than wholesale adoption define rehabilitation behavior in the region.

The determinants of these choices were far from uniform. Farmer age was positively associated with coppicing, phased replanting, and under-planting, but showed no significant link with complete replanting, suggesting older farmers gravitate toward gradual, lower-cost strategies. Education displayed the opposite pattern in an unexpected direction: it was positively associated with complete replanting but negatively associated with coppicing and under-planting, implying that schooling shapes which technique is chosen rather than simply whether rehabilitation happens. Gender mattered too, with female farmers significantly less likely to adopt phased replanting and under-planting, a pattern the authors interpret as consistent with constraints on land access, labor arrangements, and input distribution that affect women disproportionately. Household composition also proved nuanced. Active household labor, rather than raw household size, was the variable that counted, being positively linked with under-planting and negatively with coppicing.

Institutional and incentive variables told an equally differentiated story. Cooperative membership was strongly and positively associated with coppicing, while access to planting materials from the Cocoa Health and Extension Division was significantly linked only with complete replanting. Record keeping and information access pushed farmers toward complete replanting but away from coppicing, underscoring that information does not uniformly raise adoption but instead steers farmers among alternatives. Training, surprisingly, was negatively associated with phased replanting, under-planting, and complete replanting, a counterintuitive result the authors attribute cautiously to program design or targeting effects that cannot be untangled with cross-sectional data. Farm size was positively associated with phased replanting and under-planting but negatively associated with coppicing and complete replanting, and off-farm income activity correlated positively with three of the four strategies, likely by financing rehabilitation investments while drawing labor away from the most demanding option.

The choice of study region gives these findings added urgency. The Oti Region and neighboring Volta Region have watched official cocoa output collapse, with production dropping by more than 6,000 tonnes over four years and roughly 7,128 tonnes lost to smuggling into Togo between 2020 and 2025. Poor roads to remote farms make official buying centers hard to reach, pushing farmers toward quick illicit payments, and the resulting low recorded volumes starve the area of the fertilizer supplies, extension support, and youth programs that COCOBOD allocates based on tonnage. Unlike Western North, Western South, and Ashanti, which attract the bulk of research attention and intervention funding, Oti remains fertile and suitable for cocoa but largely neglected. The authors argue that understanding rehabilitation behavior in such marginal areas is essential if Ghana’s national cocoa strategy is to extend beyond its traditional heartlands.

The methodological rigor of the study strengthens its conclusions. The multivariate probit specification was chosen over multinomial alternatives because it handles correlated, non-mutually-exclusive binary outcomes while remaining computationally tractable for mid-sized agricultural surveys. Diagnostic checks confirmed the model’s suitability: mean variance inflation factors of 1.83 ruled out multicollinearity, robust standard errors corrected heteroscedasticity detected in the complete replanting and under-planting equations, and normality tests were satisfied for three of the four outcome equations. The Wald chi-squared statistic of 582.14 on 72 degrees of freedom confirmed that the full set of eighteen explanatory variables was jointly significant.

For policymakers at Ghana Cocoa Board and its Cocoa Health and Extension Division, the message is that one-size-fits-all rehabilitation programs are unlikely to match how farmers actually behave. The evidence points toward strategy-specific support: subsidized planting materials for those contemplating full replanting, cooperative-based channels for coppicing, targeted labor and land-access interventions for women, and credit or input schemes that ease the liquidity crunch of capital-intensive options. The authors are careful to note that with cross-sectional data and a sample restricted to farmers who have already rehabilitated, the findings describe associations rather than causal effects, and they call for panel studies, inclusion of non-adopters, and qualitative work to unpack the cultural and gender dynamics beneath the statistics. Still, in a sector where every hectare of diseased, abandoned farmland represents lost income for families and lost foreign exchange for a nation, knowing that farmers choose rehabilitation paths strategically rather than uniformly is a genuinely useful piece of the puzzle.

Subject of Research: Statistical modeling of cocoa farm rehabilitation strategy adoption among smallholder farmers in the Oti Region of Ghana

Article Title: Using a multivariate probit method to model decisions on cocoa farm rehabilitation in Ghana

Article References: Agbolosoo, J. A., Asiedu, C. Y., Midamba, D. C., Opoku-Mensah, S., Sarfo, B., & Kwesiga, M. (2026). Using a multivariate probit method to model decisions on cocoa farm rehabilitation in Ghana. Discover Agriculture, 4(1), Article 283. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44279-026-00765-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44279-026-00765-3

Keywords: cocoa, Ghana, farm rehabilitation, multivariate probit, smallholder farmers, coppicing, replanting, CSSVD, agricultural economics, technology adoption, COCOBOD, Oti Region