The impact of farmer field schools on the adoption of climate adaptation measures (AgrImpact)

The evaluation aims to test the effectiveness of farmer field schools in teaching farmers agroecological practices and facilitating their adaptation to climate change. The training program enrolls farmers who reside within a treatment area, have stated their interest in joining the program, and have sufficiently large production systems in the target value chains of pepper, cloves, honey, coffee, and vanilla.

2024-02-15

2024-07-01

Adaptation practice adoption scores

The training aims at teaching farmers how to adapt their agriculture with practices that benefit both harvests and the environment. To assess take up, we count the number of practices adopted and the degree to which these are implemented (both specially and across plants). For a given practice, the farmers considered for evaluation will only be those that produced the given value chain pre-intervention.

Adaptation practice knowledge scores.
Household and individual food security
Household income

The training aims to teach farmers how to adapt their agriculture to practices that benefit both harvests and the environment. A short knowledge test will be used to assess knowledge transfer. Knowledge questions will only be evaluated for the value chains that the farming household had produced prior to the intervention.

Some of the taught practices should directly impact farmers’ food security. Food security will be measured on an individual level using the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES/FAO) and on the household level using the World Food Program’s Food Consumption Score Module.

Though the full effect of the promoted FFS activities will not take place within the evaluation period, adopted practices may lead to a reallocation of labor within the household and, therefore, affect income in the short term.

This randomized control trial (RCT) will compare the impact of Farmer Field School (FFS) to a control condition that receives no intervention. After listing and screening by the implementing partner, the research team made a randomized allocation on the farmer level to the treatment or control condition and selected a sample for inclusion in the survey component. The survey treatment and control sub-samples were intended to be balanced between arms on gender.
Baseline process: The sampling lists for the survey were sent to the survey team for a field survey without disclosure of the treatment allocation. During the field survey, farmers consented with recorded verbal or written documentation. At the end of the field survey in each area, lists of the farmers to be treated in each area will bewere sent to the implementation organization in order to begin intervention activities. Due to delays in receipt of the sampling lists, an in-person baseline survey was not conducted in 3 out of the initially 4 planned sites in Anosy. Due to further delays in implementation in these 3 areas, these were dropped from evaluation, resulting in a reduced sample size and the evaluation taking place in 10 FFS sites (see details below). Our primary outcomes will be based on intention to treat analysis with key baseline covariates included to improve precision.

Due to the reported absence of an intervention on the day prior to field work in at least one area, we will undertake a per protocol analysis using the randomization assignment as an instrumental variable as recommended for pragmatic trials with incomplete adherence. Per protocol is defined as attending any session at the farmer field school.

Not available

Random selection of the survey sample and random assignment to the treatment and intervention arms will be performed by site using random numbers generated in Stata.

Individual assignment

Yes

10 sites

800 farmers at endline

Sample size by treatment arm will vary based on the number of eligible farmers able to be interviewed by site. At this time we estimate that there will be completed surveys from 435 farmers in the treatment group and 365 in the control group.

The trial is powered at 90% to detect a standardized effect size of 0.40 in the number of CSA practices taken up by FFS participants compared to controls, in line with the midpoint of the impact of studies with medium risk of bias (0.22) and overall (0.63) reported in Waddington et al. (2014). This person-randomised, blocked trial will include 10 FFS sites with an estimated 80 completed surveys completed in each area, for a total completed sample of 800 participants. To account for survey attrition, we have included 58 additional farmers in our sample. We assumed an alpha of 0.05, an effect size variability of 0.05, and covariates and the blocking variable each explaining 0.1 of the variability in the final model. This sample size is also sufficient to measure the larger effect sizes seen in the number of improved agricultural techniques practiced (Waddington et al., 2014). Due to the randomization procedure, effects can be causally attributed to the treatment with FFS.