Information about Cumin: The Effect on Crop Choice and Protection
IND -17 -1428Last modified on December 19th, 2025 at 10:17 am
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Abstract
PxD has operated the Krishi Tarang service in Gujarat since 2016 to provide free agriculture information via mobile phones using a two-way Interactive Voice Response (IVR) platform with “outbound” push calls and an “inbound” hotline service. India produces about 80% of the world’s cumin, which is a dried seed used as a spice. Gujarat produces about 85% of the country’s total output of the crop. Cumin is a high-return crop, but is susceptible to pest attacks. In 2017, only 48% of the sixty thousand farmers who use PxD’s service in Gujarat intended to grow cumin. Farmers make crop choices based on many considerations, including the costs, risks, climate, and historical selling price. One key determinant of whether a farmer grows a particular crop is the information they have about that crop.
We tested whether increasing the amount of information farmers received about cumin would increase their likelihood of cultivating cumin in the next Rabi planting season. Although we did not find a large increase in cumin cultivation, additional information about cumin led to a rise in the cumin share of total area under cultivation. Moreover, providing farmers with information about ways to prevent crop damage appears to have changed their behavior. -
Status
Completed
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Start date
Q4 Oct 2017
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End date
Q1 Jan 2018
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Experiment Location
Gujarat, India
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Partner Organization
J-PAL
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Agricultural season
Rabi
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Experiment type
A/B test
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Sample frame / target population
farmers
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Sample size
9,000
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Outcome type
Farming practices, Input adoption, Crop choice or land use
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Mode of data collection
Phone survey
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Research question(s)
1. Does the provision of information about cumin encourage farmers to grow cumin?
2. Do cumin farmers choose to grow cumin instead of or with other crops?
3. Does information on the use of fungicides encourage farmers to use fungicides and contain crop damage that is due to rainfall and weather change? -
Research theme
Agricultural management advice
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Research Design
Pre-experiment:
An indicative phone survey was conducted to understand farmers’ demand for information about cumin. Blocks, with a majority of cumin-growing farmers, were chosen from the PxD database. Some farmers were randomly selected and asked whether they would be interested in growing cumin if PxD provided them with information on cumin. In three blocks, 45% of the farmers who were asked responded positively, and the experiment proceeded.Sampling frame and selection:
We defined the population of farmers as those who didn’t grow cumin but grew other crops at the time of profiling. The total sample size was 9,000 (4,500 control and 4,500 treatment). The final randomization stratified farmers by whether they were surveyed at baseline. After attrition, removal of phone numbers designated “do-not-disturb” with the telecom operators, and removal of farmers who declined to receive information, the endline sample consisted of 5,133 farmers; a total of 3,630 of these farmers were surveyed for the endline.Intervention:
The treatment group received digital technical advice on growing cumin, such as atmospheric conditions suited for sowing and the method of sowing. We did not provide any persuasive content, such as the benefits of growing cumin. We sent a total of five automated calls: three on sowing, one with a weather alert, and one on protecting the crop against pests during rainfall. The control group received no information.Weather and pest alert messages were not part of the initial design, but were sent as the last two messages for the last week (fourth week) of information.
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Results
On average, we did not find a large or significant effect on cumin cultivation after farmers received technical advisory calls. However, the positive coefficients on the outcome variables for a subsample of farmers who were particularly receptive to phone-based advice suggest that there might be a small effect on crop cultivation choice, which we could not detect given the small size of our sample.
The treatment for this subsample of farmers was associated with a 5.2 percentage point (pp) increase in the share of the area under cultivation devoted to cumin, over the control group mean of 29%. This result is significant at the 5% level. This suggests that, even though the information on how to cultivate a new crop may not be sufficient to encourage many farmers to plant a crop they hadn’t intended to plant, the information can encourage farmers who had already planned to cultivate the crop to invest more in the crop.
In addition, the full treatment group was 3.7 pp more likely to have used fungicide to protect their cumin crop from damage from the rain, compared to 29% of farmers in the control group. So, while additional information seems unlikely to change farmer crop choice, it does appear that farmers were receptive to advice about how to protect their crops.