Soil fertility management and socio-economic factors in crop-livestock systems in Burkina Faso: A case study of composting technology

The relation between technology adoption and farmers' socio-economic characteristics has increasingly been given attention in developing countries. However, most of the studies conducted by economists dealt with the adoption of external technologies. Here, we test the determinants of compost adoption, an alternative indigenous technology for soil fertility management. The results of analysis of data from Burkina Faso, using Logit model, strongly support the hypothesis that farmers' socio-economic characteristics and their agro-ecological location significantly affect their adoption decisions. There are two main conclusions of this study: first, the agro-ecological location of farmers influence their decision to widely adopt compost technology. Second, among farmers' characteristics affecting compost adoption, three groups can be distinguished. The most important socio-economic characteristics are farmers' age, their comparative perception on the yield effect of compost with regards to other fertilizers and their annual agricultural income. A second group of characteristics include the institutional factors, which are represented by the farmers' participation in extension workshops. A third group of factors comprises the farmer's labor force participating rate, the number of ruminants owned and farmers gender. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.