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Devil in the details: measuring seeds
with guest bloggers: Naureen Karachiwalla (IFPRI), Travis J. Lybbert (UC Davis), Hope Michelson (Illinois), Joaquin Sanabria (IFDC), James Stevenson (CGIAR SPIA), and Emilia Tjernstrom (Sydney)
In our first Devil in the Details post, we sounded a cautionary note on fertilizer quality measurement, which can be hampered by pesky but crucial calibration problems that can yield misleading test results. Measuring quality matters because it helps to inform if perceptions of fertilizer quality among farmers are accurate. This, in turn, is critical to understanding drivers of low agricultural productivity associated with low utilization. Here, we shift our focus to seeds – another agricultural input that has similarly attracted the gaze of economists. Farmers are also widely concerned about seed quality but measuring seed quality (by farmers or researchers) is fraught with complexities in analysis and interpretation. At the end of this post, we provi