Farmers Willingness to Pay for an Irrigation Scheduling Tool and the Constraint on Information

T Foster^*
*Correspondence: T Foster, Department of Mechanical, Aerospace & Civil Engineering, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK, Email:

Keywords

Willingness to pay • Lack of information • Irrigation scheduling software

Introduction

Do farmers in developing nations prefer to invest in irrigation scheduling tools that monitor soil water levels to traditional irrigation methods? Farmers, researchers, practitioners of development, and policymakers all have important questions regarding the quantity and timing of the application of water to farmers' fields. The use of water and upkeep costs of irrigation infrastructure are associated with irrigated farming. Understanding farmers' context and willingness to pay (WTP) for a low-cost irrigation tool, the wetting front detector (WFD), as well as the policy environment's ability to facilitate technology adoption may help development practitioners design, educate, and disseminate new technologies and tools.

Discussion

Due to the fact that rain-fed agriculture is used by a lot of farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and irrigation is a way to adapt to climate change, demand for irrigation is growing. As the world's population grows, so does the need for sustainable food production. As a result, there must be more land for agriculture and more irrigation water needed to meet the growing demand. Irrigation agriculture uses about 70% of the world's water, and the threat of climate change is expected to increase that share even more. As a result, practitioners of development have developed programs to raise awareness of effective irrigation systems and low-cost irrigation scheduling tools in order to help smallholder farmers make the best irrigation decisions in order to maximize water use efficiency and boost productivity. Even though these tools are being promoted, little is known about how information encourages users to use them, especially in Ghana. Northern Ghana (Upper East Region) is a one-of-a-kind instance due to its monomodal rainfall and prolonged drought. Poverty is very high in the area. Despite its effectiveness, the WFD tool is more expensive than the conventional method of irrigation. This is likely to discourage adoption, particularly among farmers with limited resources. This suggests that farmers' adoption of technology is likely to vary [1,2].

The three primary research questions pertaining to farmers' adoption of the new irrigation tool and WTP are the focus of this paper: 1) Is the new tool in high demand? 2) What factors affect how easily people can access information about the tool? 3) How does the tool's information influence farmers' willingness to pay? Our study relied on a survey of irrigation farmers in rural Ghana who participated in an on-farm demonstration of the irrigation tool and expressed their WTP to answer these research questions. However, due to a lack of funds to participate in auctions, the farmers' WTP were based on their stated preferences. None of the people who watched the demonstrations had used the irrigation tool before. Despite numerous studies on technology adoption, farmers' WTP for WFD is poorly understood. The majority of studies only provided estimates of farmers' WTP for irrigation without actually examining irrigation scheduling [3-5].

Conclusion

Who utilized a contingent valuation approach to estimate farmers' WTP for the adoption of the Chameleon soil moisture monitoring tool in South- Eastern Africa. They discovered that the tool was in high demand, and WTP was being influenced by things like household characteristics, the effect of the neighborhood, the cost of irrigation, knowledge of how to use the tool, and its advantages. There are two main contributions from our study. First, we estimated the demand for WFD across a diverse sample in our study. The demand for irrigation tools was not estimated in any of the previous studies examined. We discover that farmers with information on water management are more price-sensitive than farmers without it. Implementing development projects that focus on new agricultural technologies and tools can be made less expensive with the help of the findings' technology targeting guidance. Second, the empirical findings of our research shed light on how farmers' WTP are affected by a new irrigation scheduling tool and the factors that influence access to information. According to our findings, access to information is influenced by socioeconomic, institutional, and geographical factors, as is farmers' WTP for WFD.

Acknowledgement

None.

Conflict of Interest

None.

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