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Kenya Planting Dates Trial
KEN -21 -1654Last modified on October 29th, 2025 at 12:04 pm
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Abstract
One Acre Fund (OAF) is an agricultural service provider that provides support for smallholder farmers in Africa to access agricultural inputs, training, and markets, to help the farmers increase their harvests and income. PAD and OAF began collaborating in 2016 on efforts to increase adoption of agricultural inputs and improve OAF operations in Kenya and Rwanda.
Planting at the optimal time has the potential to increase a farmer’s yield, especially for late planters, who plant after the optimal date. This trial tested whether sending farmers an SMS message prompting them to plant at the optimal time increases their likelihood of planting at this time. We also tested whether sending an additional SMS message with a personal endorsement from a trusted source and/or addressing farmers’ misconceptions about the optimal planting times increases the effectiveness of the basic SMS message.
Sending farmers planting date recommendations via SMS brings their planting dates closer, on average, to the optimal date. The effect is higher for late planters; late planters in the treatment groups planted on average four days closer to the optimal date compared to late planters in the control group. While we do not find significant effects on the proportion of farmers who planted in the optimal time window, we do find some evidence that the intervention increases the likelihood of late planters planting within five days of the optimal date. Additional SMS messages intended to boost effectiveness of the basic message did not have the intended effect. We do not find any presence of spillover effects. -
Status
Completed
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Start date
Q1 Mar 2021
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Experiment Location
Kenya
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Partner Organization
One Acre Fund (OAF)
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Agricultural season
Long Rains
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Experiment type
Impact Evaluation
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Sample frame / target population
OAF farmers in Western and Rift Valley provinces
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Sample size
15,036
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Outcome type
Farming practices
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Mode of data collection
Phone survey
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Research question(s)/hypotheses
1. Does sending farmers an SMS message indicating the optimal planting date increase the probability that farmers start planting at the optimal date?
2. Does sending farmers an additional SMS message with a personal endorsement of the suggested planting date by field officers (FOs) have any additional effects?
3.Does sending farmers an additional SMS message addressing farmer misconceptions about the optimal planting time have any additional effect on the probability that farmers start planting at the optimal date?
4. Does the treatment of some farmer groups spill over to non-treated groups at the same site? -
Research theme
Agricultural management advice
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Research design notes
The experiment randomized sites into control and treatment arms, with 50% of sites allocated to each arm. Farmer groups at the control sites received no messages.
At treatment sites, 70% of the farmer groups received one of four variations of SMS-based interventions:
1. Basic SMS messages.
2. Basic SMS messages with FO endorsement messages.
3. Basic SMS messages combined with messages correcting common misconceptions.
4. A combination of all three—basic SMS, FO endorsement, and misconception correction messages.Each variant was evenly distributed across 17.5% of treatment groups. The remaining 30% of groups at treatment sites were designated as spillover groups and did not receive any messages directly.
Randomization was stratified by district and by an indicator capturing whether a group included farmers who were part of OAF’s Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) survey activities.
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Results
Sending farmers planting date recommendations via SMS messages brings their planting dates closer to the optimal date, on average. The effect is higher for late planters; late planters in the treatment groups planted on average four days closer to the optimal date compared to late planters in the control groups. While we do not find significant effects on the extensive margin (the proportion of farmers who planted in the optimal time window) of the entire sample, we find some evidence that the intervention increases the likelihood of planting within five days of the optimal date for the late planters.
We do not find positive effects of the two additional treatment components. On the contrary, the effects of the basic SMS plus FO endorsement treatment, and the basic SMS plus misconception treatment on the likelihood of planting in the optimal time window were significantly lower than the effect of only the basic SMS treatment. We do not find any spillover effects of the treatment on non-treated farmer groups at the same site. While the trial offers promising results for the use of SMS messages to influence late planters to plant earlier, the additional treatment variations need further investigation.