African Smallholders Respond to Perceived Opportunities of High Profit from Low Risk Investment.

African smallholders readily adopt agronomic practices when they perceive adequate profit potential from investments within their financial ability and if the associated risk is acceptable. This is supported by numerous observations of significant reallocation of land to crops including new crops, response to favorable commodity supply contracts, adoption of microdose fertilizer use, response to subsidized inputs, localized irrigation and vegetable production, and dairy in Kenya. However, financial constraints and risk of lost investment are often major obstacles to adoption. A second lesson is that demonstrations alone often are not adequate with a need to also address finance, risk, input supply and/or marketing. Another lesson is that farmer exchange of information and varieties is important although a few farmers are much better sources than the majority of farmers, e.g. a few farmers may provide seed of new variety to many farmers but most early recipients will pass to very few or no farmers. Lesson four is that adoption of full packages is uncommon unless it is with a new crop. Practice effects are mostly additive, with exceptions, and step-by-step management improvements are often feasible. On the other hand, some practices do require complementary adoption of another practice in some situations; response to fertilizer and manure or to fertilizer and lime may require that both are applied on some non-responsive soils as negligible response occurs with only one applied alone.