Miracle seeds: Biased expectations, complementary input use,and the dynamics of smallholder technology adoption

This report from the University of Chicago makes the point that improved seed varieties often require complementary inputs in the form of fertilisers, pesticides, irrigation and weeding. It is a common problem that farmers fail to recognise the importance of these complementary inputs – placing too much reliance on the “miracle” seeds alone.

To fully benefit from new agricultural technologies like improved seed varieties, significantinvestment in complementary inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides, and practices such as sys-tematic planting, irrigation, and weeding are also required. Farmers may fail to recognize theimportance of these complements, leading to disappointing crop yields and outputs and, even-tually, dis-adoption of the improved variety. Using a field experiment, we test an informationintervention among smallholder maize farmers in eastern Uganda that points out these comple-mentarities. We find that farmers adopt less after they have been sensitized about the need to usecomplementary inputs to unlock the adoption premium. We rationalize this finding with a simpletheoretical model where farmers have misspecified mental models of the technology productionfunction and conclude that most farmers in our sample do indeed believe in miracle seeds.

The report is available as a PDF file which may be viewed or downloaded here.