Navigating the Measurement Frontier: New Insights into Small Farm Realities

Measurement is not only a way of describing complex realities; it can also transform them by influencing policies and interventions. We are privileged to live in a thrilling era of measurement innovation: new and better methods to deploy, and new ways of adapting familiar and proven apparatus to new problems and contexts. This paper explores how new measurement strategies are providing fresh insights into the circumstances of small-farm household worldwide and describes challenges that these techniques have yet to overcome. Because the small farm sector plays a crucial role in global food security, global value chains and rural livelihoods, understanding its conditions and dynamics is a persistent focus of policymakers and researchers. I discuss how satellite-based assessments of crop yields, tree cover, temperature, and rainfall, laboratory measures of soil and agricultural input quality, GPS-based plot area calculations, labor activity trackers, and high- frequency household surveys conducted via cellular phones are providing improved understanding of fundamental dimensions of small farms and agrarian households. I identify important gaps in what is currently measured, discuss challenges related to implementing and interpreting new measures, and argue that new measurement strategies can be combined effectively with continued sustained investment for traditional “analog measures” – the household and farm surveys that remain fundamental for data collection in low-income countries.