Perceptions and performance of conservation agriculture practices in northwestern Ghana

• Farmer knowledge about several agronomic principles central to conservation agriculture was assessed.
• Farmer field schools and experimentation increased participant knowledge on fertilizers and no-till.
• Non-participants also showed an increase in knowledge due to spillover effects from the training and experimentation.
• Partial budgeting results of the financial performance of no-till treatments indicated limited or no economic benefits.
• Short-run economic constraints appear more limiting to adoption of conservation practices than farmer knowledge.

Agriculture in Northwestern Ghana is subsistence in nature with low productivity due to continuous monocropping of cereals with low input usage. Conservation agriculture has been introduced in the northwestern part of Ghana in 2010 as a potential intervention to address these issues. A baseline study was conducted to gather farmers’ biophysical and socio-economic characteristics, farming methods and a knowledge index of conservation agriculture practices. The knowledge index indicated limited understanding of most of the components of conservation agriculture practices by both male and female farmers. Two farmer field schools aimed at promoting the conservation agricultural practices were conducted and offered to approximately 1/3 of all individuals surveyed at the baseline. These same farmers were resurveyed in 2012 in order to determine whether their knowledge on conservation agriculture practices has changed using a double-difference approach. The approach is also be used to determine whether innate perceptions and biases against conservation agriculture have changed over time through the field schools. These findings are supported with partial budgets on conservation practices in order to determine whether knowledge or on-farm economics limit adoption of conservation practices.