The impact of adopting artificial cattle insemination technology by smallholder farmers on their wellbeing: The case of Yem Special District, Ethiopia

Abstract

This study investigated the impact of adopting artificial cattle insemination technology (ACI) by smallholder farmers on their well-being in the case of Yem special district. Using three-stage sampling techniques, cross-sectional data were collected from 361 household head that include adopter and non-adopter of ACI. The propensity score matching method was used to estimate the impact of adopting ACI on the welfare of households. The method was checked for covariate balancing with a standardized bias, t-ratio, and joint significance-level tests. Moreover, sensitivity analysis of the estimated effect of adoption to unobserved selection bias was checked using Rosenbaum bounds procedure. We employed STATA Version 13 software to run the estimation and diagnostic tests. The results revealed that ACI adoption practices have a positive impact on the wellbeing of households. The results indicate that the adoption of ACI technology on average increases income from milk, livestock, and the total consumption of households by 62.742, 31.215, and 11,325.694 Birrs per year, respectively, compared to non-adopters at a 1% significant level. The sensitivity analysis shows that the estimated impact was insensitive to unobserved selection bias.