The Value of Advice: Evidence from Thousands of Smallholder Farms in the Philippines
Speakers
Canberk Ucel
Assistant Professor, Bilkent University in Turkey, Visiting Scholar at INSEAD
Canberk Ucel is an Assistant Professor at Bilkent University in Turkey and a Visiting Scholar at INSEAD. He completed his PhD in Operations, Information and Decisions at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 2022, and also holds an undergraduate degree in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University. He is strongly interested in studying operational and organizational issues in understudied industries facing complex social, economic and environmental challenges, and his current research focuses on the agriculture industry, which contributes significantly to environmental conservation and economic development, and employs most of the world’s poorest workers. His research, which has been recognized by several academic awards, leverages proprietary, granular farm operations data he collected through several industry partnerships he built during his doctoral studies, as well as extensive field work, to generate practical recommendations for farmers, companies and policymakers to advance key economic, social and environmental goals. He strives to translate his research into positive change in the industry, including through large-scale randomized controlled field trials, and advocates agriculture as a fruitful context for managerial and operational research with potential to generate significant societal impact. His teaching experience spans various MBA, graduate and undergraduate courses at Wharton and Bilkent related to operations, supply chains, and data analytics and statistics, and includes writing teaching cases, migrating courses online, and designing and teaching new class sessions and courses.
| Date: |
| Friday, 2 February 2024 |
| Time: |
| 10:00 am - 11:30 am |
| Venue: |
|
Institute of Data Science Innovation 4.0 I4-01-03 (Level 1, Seminar Room) 3 Research Link Singapore 117602 (Map) |
Abstract
Increasing the productivity of Philippine coconut farms that are well below world standards could improve the livelihoods of 3.4 million farming families, most suffering poverty. Government and supporting organizations have long promoted Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs), which decades of public research suggests would double farm productivity with little capital investment, but have failed to achieve widespread adoption and productivity gains. We study the role of access to change agents in facilitating GAP adoption and effective implementation using proprietary data on the productivity, granular farming practices and characteristics of 1,998 smallholders. Our quantitative analysis leverages the pseudo-exogenous variation in agricultural extension office locations to find that being within 8 kilometers of an extension office is associated with greater awareness of central recommendations for 7 of 8 GAPs, increased adoption rates for three most effective GAPs, and 36% higher productivity, on average, on otherwise comparable farms. Our post-hoc analysis further suggests that physical interactions enable change agents to support complex practice adoption and local implementation decisions. Moreover, we find significant heterogeneity in the effects of agent access, and offer facility reallocation and farm visit schedules to improve service coverage and effectiveness using existing agent capacity. Our results suggest that supporting organizations should integrate change agent support or otherwise focus on developing better customized farming advice, integrate farmer feedback, and assist smallholders with the finer details of implementation leveraging emerging information technologies. Evidence-based provision of advisory services, extended beyond the Philippine context, could potentially benefit two billion people worldwide dependent on smallholder farms, and redound benefits to small heterogenous firms that dominate vital functions in other industries. We suggest new avenues for research on data-driven, evidence-based improvements in the provision and design of advisory services, e.g. related to optimal facility allocation and agent visit schedules and the development and communication of effective operational recommendations.