How accurate are yield estimates from crop cuts? Evidence from smallholder maize farms in Ethiopia.

ABSTRACT: Agricultural statistics and applied analyses have benefitted from moving from farmer estimates of yield to crop cut based estimates, now regarded as a gold standard. However, in practice, crop cuts and other sample-based protocols vary widely in the details of their implementations and little empirical work has documented how alternative yield estimation methods perform. Here, we undertake a well-measured experiment of multiple yield estimation methods on 237 smallholder maize plots in Amhara region, Ethiopia. We compare yield from a full plot harvest with farmer assessments and with estimates from a variety of field sampling protocols: W-walk, transect, random quadrant, random octant, center quadrant, and 3 diagonal quadrants. We find that protocol choices are important: alternative proto

SUBMITTER: Kosmowski F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8639447 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature