The speaker, Jordan Blekking (Postdctoral Associate, Department of Global Development, Cornell) is investigating how smallholder farmers’ perceptions of environmental conditions vary across locations and how these perceptions inform their cropping decisions in areas experiencing high rainfall variability. Second, he uses publicly available, high resolution (<250m) remotely sensed products to investigate how urban food retail environments change as African urban areas grow. He has conducted research in Kenya, Zambia, and South Africa.

Declining soil health is a major challenge for smallholder farmers in Africa. Smallholders often struggle to align their intentions to improve soil health with on-farm behaviors. Using a longitudinal dataset collected by an NGO from 170 smallholders in Western Kenya, we examine the extent to which short message service (SMS) messages that are targeted toward specific behaviors can enhance the adoption of sustainable gardening practices following a six-month farmer field school training. We find that, on average, farmers that received timely SMS messages targeted to specific practices adopted 0.44 more practices during a one-year period (p <0.05), even when controlling for socioeconomic factors. We also tested whether framing related to community social norms were effective, but we did not find evidence that social norm framing improved adoption rates. These findings suggest that behaviorally targeted and temporally relevant SMS messaging can significantly increase the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices. In-person messaging remains the most important avenue for information dissemination, but our findings illustrate how NGOs and other agricultural extension service providers can use SMS messages to maintain farmer engagement and adoption of sustainable practices following a training period.

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