Land productivity and plot size : is measurement error driving the inverse relationship ?

By Sam Desiere, Dean Jolliffe. 2017

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper revisits the decades-old puzzle of the inverse plot-size productivity relationship, which states that land productivity decreases as plot size increases. Existing empirical studies on the inverse plot-size productivity relationship define land productivity or yields as self-reported production divided by plot size. This paper considers an alternative approach to estimating yields based on crop cuts. The crop-cut method entails measuring and harvesting randomly selected subplots by trained technicians, and is recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization for the accurate measurement of crop production. Using data representative of rural Ethiopia, the analysis indicates that the inverse relationship is strong when based on self-reported production, but disappears when based on crop-cut estimates. The inference from these findings is that the inverse relationship is an artifact of systematic overreporting of production by farmers on small plots, and underreporting on larger plots. The paper also discusses how rejecting the inverse plot-size productivity relationship has significant implications for the inverse farm-size productivity relationship.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e1c6b8c4979f9170db622330279afc8e573bb6d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

In Soil Science

Citations in the corpus

Measurement Error Mechanisms Matter: Agricultural Intensification with Farmer Misperceptions and Misreporting (2019, methodology): “These relationships describe the well-documented empirical pattern of regression-to-the-mean in self-reported plot size in sub-Saharan Africa (Carletto, Savastano and Zezza, 2013; Carletto, Gourlay and Winters, 2015; Bevis and Barrett, 2018; Desiere and Jolliffe, 2018; Gourlay, Kilic and Lobell, 201”
Eyes in the Sky, Boots on the Ground: Assessing Satellite‐ and Ground‐Based Approaches to Crop Yield Measurement and Analysis (2018, unknown): “…data, and the emerging evidence on systematic measurement errors in farmerreported crop production estimates that may have a bearing on fundamental relationships in smallholder production systems (Gourlay, Kilic, and Lobell 2017; Desiere and Jolliffe 2018; Abay et al. 2019; Wossen et al. 2019).”
The Relationship between Farm Size and Productivity in Agriculture: Evidence from Maize Production in Northern China (2019, unknown): “This phenomenon is also found in Sub-Saharan Africa (Barrett, Bellemare, and Hou 2010; Carletto, Savastano, and Zezza 2013; Larson et al. 2014; Desiere and Jolliffe 2018).”