Maize Yield and Fertilizer Profitability in Tanzanian Smallholder Plots

Active soil organic carbon, not total carbon, strongly conditions maize yield response to nitrogen fertilizer in Tanzanian smallholder plots. Under optimistic price assumptions, 71% of plots show an average value-cost ratio above 1.5, but this share drops to 2% under less favorable price ratios. The panel data reveals the intertwined biophysical and economic factors behind low fertilizer adoption in the region.

Use Cases

• Modeling maize yield response to nitrogen based on active soil carbon and rainfall levels.
• Calculating economic returns to fertilizer investment under varying farmgate price ratios.
• Assessing spatial and temporal variation in fertilizer profitability across smallholder plots.
• Prioritizing regions for soil carbon management to incentivize sustainable fertilizer use.

Strengths

• Focuses on active soil carbon, a specific and influential component for nutrient cycling, unlike prior studies using total carbon.
• Provides concrete economic analysis, quantifying the share of profitable plots (71%, 30%, 2%) under specific price ratio scenarios.
• Uses plot-level panel data, allowing for analysis of changes over time at a granular spatial scale.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, column names, specific time range, and last update date are unavailable across all sources.
• The dataset's availability and file formats are unspecified, hindering practical access and reproducibility.

Provenance

Source

International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, author Jordan Chamberlin.

Collection Method

Plot-level panel data collected from Tanzanian smallholder farmers.

Time Range

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Freshness

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Geography

Tanzania