Does Training Farmers on Multiple Technologies Deter Adoption? Evidence from a Farm Management Training Program in Bangladesh

Farmers in low-income countries suffer from several challenges that prevent them from achieving higher yields and generating economic gains. Improved agricultural technology can help remove some of the existing obstacles to high agricultural productivity. This paper evaluates an agricultural intervention that provided groundnut farmers in rural Bangladesh with comprehensive recommendations on Integrated Pest Management (IPM), Good Agricultural Practices (GAP), and agronomical suggestions. Using reduced form econometric analyses, we assess the impact of the training program on input usage and yield. Our findings indicate that when farmers receive training on several technologies together, they tend to adopt only the lowcost ones, making such a training program less effective due to the non-adoption of the potentially more beneficial higher-cost technologies. We find significant changes (based on recommendations) in the usage of traditional inputs, but not in new ones. The adjustments in traditional inputs are easier to remember and cheaper to implement. We construct a simple model to show that the learning costs are high for new inputs, leading to selective adoption. Policy recommendations include simplifying complex training into manageable components and implementing strategies to reduce the learning costs associated with new inputs.