article · Agricultural and Food Economics
Promoting conservation agriculture alongside biochar amendments is often viewed as a pathway to sustainable smallholder farming, but its effects on farm labour remain contested. A randomized controlled trial involving 400 smallholder farmers across two districts in Uganda examined the labour impacts of training and field demonstrations on conservation agriculture with and without biochar. The combined intervention increased overall farm labour requirements by about 36 percent, driven primarily by a 54 percent surge in unpaid family labour, while the use of hired labour fell. Labour savings were limited strictly to land preparation. Consequently, overall returns to labour dropped by roughly 45 percent compared to conventional practices, with no significant gains in labour productivity. These findings demonstrate that introducing biochar and conservation agriculture can substantially heighten family labour burdens without immediate productivity offsets unless bundled with complementary labour-saving tools.
Efforts to encourage climate-smart agriculture often overlook the heavy physical workload placed on farming households. Demonstrating that conservation agriculture and biochar can sharply increase family labour while cutting labour returns highlights critical adoption barriers. Agricultural programmes and policy makers must account for household labour constraints to design practical interventions that improve farm sustainability without imposing severe unpaid burdens on rural families.
This research evaluates applied farming packages directly tested with smallholder farmers in Uganda. Agricultural extension services, non-governmental organisations, and agritech developers could use these findings to redesign soil-management training packages. To make biochar and conservation agriculture economically viable, developers and implementers must bundle these techniques with labour-saving mechanisation, such as specialised low-cost application or planting equipment, before scaling adoption across smallholder markets.
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Abstract Conservation agriculture (CA) and the use of biochar as a soil amendment can promote productive, resilient, and sustainable smallholder farming. However, adopting these practices requires a shift from conventional methods, potentially changing labour use and returns, the extent of which remains poorly understood. Using data from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) of 400 farmers designed to be representative of smallholder farmers in two districts of Uganda, this study assesses how an informational intervention (delivered through instruction and participatory field demonstrations) on CA methods with and without biochar affect labour use and productivity. Control group farmers were compared to those receiving (i) CA and (ii) CA+BIOCHAR interventions. First difference and inverse probability–weighted regression-adjustment model results indicate that the CA+BIOCHAR intervention increased labour use, with no significant labour productivity gains, compared to the control group. Labour input rose by about 36%, driven by a 54% increase in family labour, while hired labour input declined. Extra work was hence met by family labour rather than paid work. Labour savings occurred only in land preparation, and overall returns to labour were roughly 45% lower than conventional practice. The shifts in labour use and productivity are largely attributable to the information intervention, which increased cultivated area, area under minimum tillage, crop diversity, and biochar application. Taken together, these findings show that, over the study period following the intervention, the promoted CA and biochar package was associated with higher labour demand and no clear labour productivity gains. Bundling training with complementary interventions that tackle the labour burden inherent in smallholder agriculture may be necessary to achieve both labour-saving and labour productivity gains from CA and biochar adoption.
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DOI: 10.1186/s40100-026-00515-5
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