See it grow: Monitoring the use of stress-tolerant varieties and seed performance

Farming is an inherently high-risk activity, and farmers’ livelihoods depend on a set of interlinked environmental factors including weather, soil conditions, disease, pests, and more. Unfortunately, globally, many of the risks in agricultural production have been exacerbated by increasingly erratic and extreme weather patterns (Porter et al. 2014). One way to mitigate such climate risk is the use of seed varieties that are bred to be resilient to the types of extreme weather that crops regularly suffer, such as drought (Cacho et al. 2020). Use of such seeds can potentially help reduce insurance premiums to more sustainable levels, as drought-tolerant varieties could help mitigate losses from moderate droughts and thus insurance would only be required to cover farmers for losses associated with more severe droughts.

In this project note, we examine to what extent the use of drought-tolerant varieties is associated with improved performance in the context of a crop insurance project in Kenya. We hypothesize that crops grown from drought-tolerant varieties sustain less damage than other varieties. We test this hypothesis and extend our analysis to ask if there are phenological differences between stress-tolerant varieties (STVs) and non-STVs that would affect the period during which insurance coverage is needed. Finally, since both reduced risk exposure and phenological differences could affect insurance payouts, and thereby insurance premiums in the longer run, we examine differences in farmers’ yields and insurance payouts between the two groups.