Economic aspects of soil fertility management and agroforestry practices

Analyses of adoption of soil fertility management and agroforestry practices by farmers in tropical countries are relatively sparse. They provide a patchwork picture of cases where adoption occurred relatively rapidly and was quite widespread and other cases where adoption did not occur on any significant scale. This chapter deals with the economic concepts that can be used by scientists interested in increasing the probability of adoption of soil fertility management practices by farmers.It is stated in Chapter 1 of this book that: ‘When designing or improving agroforestry techniques it is ... important that the technique is matched with the fertility problems that are seen as priorities at a given site rather than assuming that every type of agroforestry will improve soil fertility in general.’ The goal in this chapter is to present economic concepts for matching soil fertility interventions to both farmers’ constraints and objectives and those of society in order to increase their likelihood of adoption. The chapter highlights key economic concepts and processes that biophysical scientists should find helpful in putting their own work into the broader context of the farmer’s economic environment. It does not attempt to provide detailed discussions of economic approaches to the assessment of agroforestry practices for professional economists (economists are not the major intended audience for this book). Furthermore such detailed discussions are not readily available in the literature and therefore may constitute a gap which needs to be filled.

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