Abstract
This paper examines the status and determinants of adoption/diffusion of sustainableland use and crop management technologies, including conservation tillage (CT), croprotation (CR), fallowing (FL), crop residue management (RM) and organic farming (OF), andcompare them with the determinants of adoption of a new crop variety (VT). Data werecollected from 297 rural households in Ethiopia from December 2009 to January 2010. A binary logit model was used to analyze the effect of socioeconomic, geographical and socialnetwork variables. Notable contributions of this study are the collection of detailedgeographical information using GPS and the measurement of the extent and density of socialnetworks of each household using the first-name method developed in the social network literature. In the 2009 cropping season, about 7, 87, 67, 16, 69 and 72 percent of interviewedhouseholds used CT, CR, OF, FL, RM and VT, respectively. The empirical results show thatricher households are more likely to use more of these technologies. Focusing on OF as atypical resource conserving technology, we find that perceptions about the changes in water quantity, household asset, literacy rate, distance to agricultural cooperative, perception aboutthe benefit of the technology, and the density of social networks have a positive impact on theadoption of OF. However, these factors have no significant effect on the adoption of VT. Theresult addresses that how resource conserving technologies and standard new technologiessuch as new varieties are adopted is quite different.