The PxD Experiment Registry documents our design experiments and impact evaluations—from simple A/B tests to large-scale randomized impact evaluations. It captures experiments we've conducted on our own services and with partners, measuring how specific service design changes affect outcomes and the overall impact of digital agriculture services. The Registry is searchable, filterable, and exportable, and is designed as an open resource to share learnings with others building digital agricultural services. For questions or publishing inquiries, contact info@precisiondev.org.

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Piloting the Distribution of Stress-tolerant Seeds to Agro-dealers

IND -25 -2995

Last modified on December 19th, 2025 at 10:42 am

    Basic Information

  • Abstract
    Climate change is increasing smallholder exposure to weather shocks, which makes scalable delivery of climate-adaptation technologies a policy priority. Input suppliers, who are farmers’ trusted source of information, often lack incentives to introduce new technologies rapidly, or they avoid taking this risk, without intervention. Building on a study (Dar et al., 2024), which found over 50% higher adoption rates from in-person free trial-seed delivery to private agro-dealers when compared to spreading information from government agents to farmers, our objective was to refine a free trial-seed distribution model to use fewer in-person components than Dar et al. used, so that policymakers can facilitate seed distribution at scale using existing seed distribution logistics.

    Building on work in a pilot in Rabi 2024, PxD partnered with Krushisharang, a private seed company in Gujarat, to pilot low-cost approaches to distributing free trial-seed bags for a high-yielding groundnut variety resistant to pests and diseases, Girnar 4, in Kharif 2025. We randomized 12 blocks into three groups that varied the delivery models of free trial-seed bags to local agro-dealers: (1) direct delivery with implementer-led recruitment of local recipient dealers; (2) collection-based hub-and-spoke distribution via the distributor-affiliated dealer, also with implementer-led recruitment; and (3) dealer-directed distribution at the affiliated dealer’s discretion. Results indicate that implementer-led recruitment (direct-delivery and hub-and-spoke models) achieved full or near-full distribution to targeted agro-dealers. By contrast, dealer-directed distribution produced minimal reach beyond distributor-affiliated dealers.
  • Status
    Completed
  • Start date
    Q2 Apr 2025
  • Experiment Location
    Gujarat, India
  • Partner Organization
    Krushisharang Agriclinic Pvt. Ltd. & Fule Seeds
  • Agricultural season
    Kharif

    • Research Design

  • Experiment type
    Other
  • Sample frame / target population
    Krushisharang-affiliated agrodealers and agrodealers listed on publicly available rosters
  • Sample size
    48
  • Outcome type
    Input adoption
  • Mode of data collection
    Phone survey
  • Research question(s)
    1. Does implementer-led versus dealer-led recruitment of agro-dealers affect the reach and completeness of free trial-seed bag distribution to intended agro-dealer recipients?
    2. Does centralizing delivery through Krushisharang-affiliated dealers (hub-and-spoke model) improve the reach and completeness of seed bag distribution to intended agro-dealer recipients, compared to direct delivery to individual agro-dealers?
    3. Can leveraging existing relationships among agro-dealers (dealer-directed model) increase the reach and completeness of seed bag distribution to intended agro-dealer recipients?
  • Research theme
    Input markets, Input recommendations, Service design
  • Research Design

    Sample frame and selection criteria:
    We selected 12 groundnut-growing blocks that had active Krushisharang-affiliated dealers.
    For each block, we recruited three additional agro-dealers by randomly sorting agro-dealers from publicly available rosters and closing recruitment once we successfully recruited three agro-dealers.

    Randomization protocol:
    We randomly assigned the 12 blocks in equal numbers to one of three treatment groups (four blocks per group):
    Group 1: Direct delivery model.
    Group 2: Hub-and-spoke model.
    Group 3: Krushisharang-dealer-directed model.
    We randomized at the block level, stratified by whether the Krushisharang-registered agro-dealer in the block had received a free trial-seed bag during the previous Rabi 2024 pilot.

    Intervention details:
    Group 1—Direct-delivery model: Krushisharang’s transport service directly delivered bags to all four agro-dealers in each block (one Krushisharang-affiliated dealer and three recruited agro-dealers).
    Group 2—Hub-and-spoke model: Krushisharang’s transport service delivered all four bags per block to the Krushisharang-affiliated dealer; we asked this dealer to retain one bag and distribute the remaining three to the recruited agro-dealers in the block; we facilitated these linkages.
    Group 3—Dealer-directed model: Krushisharang’s transport service delivered all four bags per block to the Krushisharang-affiliated dealer; we asked this dealer to retain one bag, independently select three agro-dealers in their block, and deliver the remaining bags to these selected agro-dealers.

    Data collection and measurement:
    We conducted phone surveys to track the delivery to the intended agro-dealers.

    For more information on underlying evidence for this study, see Dar et al. (2024) or the working paper version.

    • Results

  • Results
    Group 1—Direct delivery model: All 16 agro-dealers (four Krushisharang-affiliated and 12 recruited) successfully received the free trial-seed bags.

    Group 2—Hub-and-spoke model: All 16 seed bags were successfully delivered to the four Krushisharang-affiliated dealers in this group (four bags per dealer). Of the 12 recruited agro-dealers, nine collected their trial-seed bags from their respective Krushisharang-affiliated dealers. Of the three who did not, two cited the long distance to the affiliated agro-dealer’s shop and one reported that the dealer was unavailable.

    Group 3—Krushisharang-dealer-directed model: All 16 seed bags were successfully delivered to the four Krushisharang-affiliated dealers. Only two affiliated dealers in this group had distributed any trial-seed bags by the end of the pilot in June 2025; in both cases, the recipients were farmers instead of other agro-dealers. One affiliated dealer distributed a single bag to one farmer, and the other distributed one bag each to two farmers. None of the seed bags in this group reached non-affiliated agro-dealers.

    Summary: Implementer-led recruitment of recipients (Groups 1 and 2) enabled broader and more reliable distribution to intended agro-dealer recipients compared to the relationship-based approach in Group 3. Direct delivery achieved full coverage in all four blocks, while the hub-and-spoke model achieved partial coverage in some blocks. Given the small number of randomized clusters, the differences between these two implementer-led models are suggestive but not statistically significant.

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