International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics
Abstract
This paper presents an economic evaluation of technology packages based on trials conducted at the Sahelian Center, ICRISAT, Niger during 1986-88. The financial calculations suggest that the application of phosphorus in a manually cultivated rotation of millet with cowpea or annual millet/cowpea intercrop may be the packages to recommend to farmers. The analysis showed that economies of farm size are necessary for relative profitability of using animal traction. Low post-harvest product prices were used to calculate the budgets, therefore, the use of marketing strategies that take advantage of peak prices for grains and fodder could permit substantial improvements upon the calculated returns. On the other hand, technologies that show superior on-station performance typically experience substantial yield gaps under farmer management, and hence the actual sizes of incremented returns would be lower in on-farm situation
