Study context

Data collection and analysis

The farmers interviewed were purposively selected to reach the regular customers of Human Waste Derived Fertiliser (HWDF) producing companies. These were targetted as the original aim of the study was to inform the increased use of HWDF, but the final results had much wider relevance. Snowball sampling was used to find other HWDF users until saturation was reached. In both countries, the farmers using HWDF were horticultural farmers growing cash crops, as this is the market segment targetted by HWDF-producing companies.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the twenty farmers in Kenya who were currently using HWDF supplied from a sales hub in the town of Embu and 23 farmers in Ghana who were identified by the extension worker and research assistant in two irrigation projects where the HWDF Company were selling their fertiliser. In terms of understanding how they interacted with mobile technology for information in farming, they were asked the following key questions and probed further depending on the answers:

• Do you own/use a smart phone?

• How much and what type of fertiliser do you use?

• What are the main challenges in horticulture?

• What are the main sources of information you use for farming?

• Why do you use these?

• Have you ever used mobile phone/internet resources for decision making in farming? Why?

• What are the main areas of information gaps that would be useful to know in farming?

• Have you ever carried out soil testing in your farm?

The interviews were conducted before any soil tests were conducted and the questions were not specifically about any technology, rather were about any soil tests that farmers had experienced or were familiar with. Interviews were conducted in the preferred language of the interviewee with the assistance of a translator. In Kenya a research assistant was hired to translate and arrange interviews. One focus group was conducted with an existing association of farmers in Kenya, this group contained 12 members who used HWDF in horticulture around Embu; no similar group meetings existed in Ghana so focus groups were not arranged.

In Kenya the farmers were mainly in horticulture growing tomatoes or watermelons. The farms were in three counties, Machakos, Tharaka and Embu, as shown in Figure 1. Seventeen out of twenty farmers were using smartphones capable of running android apps that could assist in agriculture. Their farms ranged from 5 to 50 acres (2–20.2 ha) in total size. Farmers often moved from one short term rental farm to another. Twelve of the farmers were in a collective group that worked together, whilst the remaining eight were in informal networks of support.

Figure 1.

Area of Interviewees in Kenya (a) and Ghana (b).

The two projects visited in Ghana were Tuba and Klagon, both within 50 km of Accra as shown in Figure 1. Each project contained around 200 hectares of land with 200 farmers each, so most farmers had around 1 hectare of land on which they grew different vegetables depending on season and demand, okra and tomatoes being most common. For each project there is a government extension officer responsible for providing information and training to farmers and a management team responsible for maintaining the distribution of water.

Interview transcripts and focus group notes were coded thematically using Nvivo 12 according to guidelines set out by Robson and McCartan (2016). The research had ethical approval from Cranfield University CURES/5687/2018.

The soil is red

After 2 months of preparing and adjusting the methodology to use the paper strips so that the researcher would have a set method to apply in Kenya and Ghana, it was time to travel for fieldwork. As the flight brought the researcher over the slopes of Mount Kenya and Embu, a key first challenge emerged: The soil is red. The paper strip is supposed to turn red to indicate nitrogen strength in the red soil. The soil throughout the entire research area had a heavy enrichment of iron and aluminium giving a strong red hue to the entire landscape. When using the coarse filter papers that allowed for a quick filter and fast result, this left an entirely red filtrate that simply dyed the soil testing kits bright red and prevented any app or adjusted reading to be taken by the phone camera. Using a fine filter paper did remove the reddish hue from the filtrate, but added hours to a technology whose entire premise was speed. Other options that could advance its ability would have included using syringe filters where pressure could be applied instead of waiting for gravity settling, or using soil extractants (Golicz et al., 2021; Mallory et al., 2022). Both of these options would have also added to the cost and time per sample which stood at £0.90 per sample for a strip and filter paper already. Any soil fertility analysis tool would need to analyse more than simply nitrogen, so the cost for sampling one nutrient could prove to be prohibitive.

Solving the wrong problem

In both case studies, farmers were asked what the major challenges they faced were, to identify what the major gaps or areas of demand for information in farming would be. Here a key theme emerged that soil fertility and soil testing was not a major priority amongst the farmers either in Kenya or Ghana.

In Kenya, volatile market prices were cited as the major challenge (Figure 2). The prices of watermelons and tomatoes were very volatile with people often citing eight-fold variation in gate prices from season to season. This market volatility was one of the key challenges that the farmers felt a lack of an agency in being able to manage. They had limited management strategies to deal with or predict price volatility as they knew it was dependent on supply from other farmers who could also respond to price volatility. Instead the most common approach was to split the farm into smaller areas and plant at different times to get a constant supply of harvest to be able to sell crops throughout the year and balance out the fluctuating prices:

Other major issues that the farmers cited were pests, the climate which affects the survival of crops (particularly in heavy rains which there had been in May 2018), access to water for horticulture and the banning of logging which made accessing and using support stakes for tomatoes more difficult. Farmers were then asked about the most important gaps in information about farming and how they perceived the potential use of soil testing. Besides price information, further information about chemicals and rates of fertiliser applications were the main information gaps identified:

Farmers in Ghana were also asked about the challenges in agriculture, with the results shown in Figure 3. The major challenges cited were again pests, though the market was a lesser concern and instead accessing water for irrigation was a bigger concern to the farmers. The market may be of less concern as farmers are closer to Accra so can easily travel to more markets rather than relying on brokers.

Figure 2.

Challenges in agriculture in Kenya.

Figure 3.

Challenges in agriculture in Ghana.

Pests were the main issue cited by interviewees, with yields often affected particularly by armyworms in maize crops:

Irrigation was also a major issue for farmers. The farmers in Ghana were on an irrigation scheme where they were paying for irrigated land as a service rather than managing it themselves, for this reason they often cited shortages or breakdowns in supply. The market was less of a concern for farmers, with price variations still prevalent but less extreme than in Kenya.

On the whole interviewees did not cite lacking information for farm management, with most expressing a happiness with the relationship with the extension officer being able to assist them.

Three farmers cited issues with the soil as the project had been using the same land for over thirty years so the soil quality was beginning to degrade and needed regular compost or manure application to maintain health. One farmer wanted to be able to have information about his soil, as he had experienced differential growing rates across his farm. Knowing the market and climate was another area of information cited by interviewees.

Overall, there were a suite of issues seen as important by farmers in Kenya and Ghana that soil testing would not solve. When farmers are operating with scarce resources, it seems unlikely that they would invest the time and money required to begin using the soil testing kits implemented in this project.

Failure fatigue and trust

One of the major issues that emerged through interviews with farmers, was that there was a reduced trust in outsiders providing information or new technologies due to previous failures. This affected both the openness of farmers to soil testing or information technologies, but it also meant much of their communication and information sharing was farmer-to-farmer which would affect the design and adoption of any app.

These issues and perceptions were formed from experiences with previous organisations, sometimes from government and sometimes from private sector, providing soil testing services. The experiences either involved waiting too long for information so farmers had to plant before they received any information and guidance from the soil testing results, or that when the results and advice came it was not possible to act on. For example, one organisation in Kenya recommending switching from Calcium Ammonium Nitrate (CAN), the most commonly used fertiliser, to another brand that was not available locally. In Kenya, 11 out of 20 farmers were aware of the possibility to get soil tested, but only two had done this with government labs. These had never received the results. In Ghana, there was an extension worker serving the irrigation projects, who had access to soil testing kits left by a previous NGO project. These were rarely used however.

These experiences of previous NGO projects and technologies either failing or leaving them without the results or expected benefits meant that farmers predominantly relied on their own personal networks for information. All interviewees cited working with fellow farmers for information about farm management. This ranged from formalised groups of information sharing to neighbours visiting each other informally:

Beyond their own personal networks of farmers, farmers often relied on agronomists or brokers for information. Due to the dual role of providing information and selling products, there is an issue of distrust in agronomists and brokers with some farmers, though in the absence of extension officers and with limited use of mobile information they are the main source of new information for farmers:

In one example a farmer used social media to connect with new markets but this did not succeed as the buyers never showed up. This constitutes a large risk in markets that have long transport distances and perishable goods:

This technology requires communication between farmers who they do not have an existing relationship with, when much of the farming relationships are heavily personal.

Norms of communication and information sharing

Many farmers in Ghana interviewed were illiterate and did not own smartphones making innovations that used apps for communication inappropriate. Only 6 out of 23 farmers interviewed in Ghana used smartphones. All 20 farmers interviewed in Kenya did have smartphones. Even when farmers did have smartphones, their role was often to enable oral and visual communication between existing networks of farmers. This was either done through phone calls or by sending photos and videos through a WhatsApp group. Text was rarely used by farmers when communicating with the researcher or within their groups, showing the limitations of apps and information interventions based on people reading information, particularly if it is in a second or third language. This was also informally experienced in disseminating results from soil tests that were conducted as part of the research back to the farmers through WhatsApp, where written result reports were sent but the main use of WhatsApp messaging for them was to send photos.

Broken promises

The research found that farmers had already had NGOs, businesses and governments making similar promises to those of the technology studied here. Often the results or information never reached the farmers, or in the worst case when the farmer adopted the recommended measures their yields declined. Taking Rousseau and Burt’s definition of trust as ‘a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon the positive expectations of the intentions or behaviour of another’ (Rousseau & Burt, 1998, p. 395), these previous experiences of accepting vulnerability only to have negative outcomes, reduced the trust of outsiders amongst the farmers interviewed. This consequently reduced the willingness to adopt and try technologies explored in this research. Taking the example of mobile technology connecting farmers to new markets and enabling them to get the best prices, the importance of interpersonal trust has been neglected. When a farmer in Kenya did use mobile technology to connect to a new seller, the seller did not respond and the sale failed which has larger consequences than getting reliable buyers even if the selling price is lower. This risk is relevant to farmers in Kenya and Ghana where there is little formal contract structure or legal recourse to recover from a failed transaction or to demand a refund for a soil test where the results are never provided. Instead systems of interpersonal trust are developed amongst farmers. This is comparable to the trust networks that emerge in diamond-trading, where the scope for theft or non-delivery of contracts is high but the recourse to deal with the consequences is low meaning there is a need for trust networks (Richman, 2006). This determinant of trust in use of information was also found in a social network analysis of farmer knowledge exchange, where farmers were found to prefer knowledge from trusted individuals and developed experience (Wood et al., 2014). Whilst the researcher in this research was able to disseminate the soil testing results back to the farmers, they often found them inappropriate and difficult to use. This is because the results were written whereas most communication by farmers was either oral or visual, and the test results did not have a clear associated action that farmers could take.

Whilst the project succeeded in an academic sense in demonstrating the viability of the nitrogen testing, it did not meet the expectations of the research participants which could contribute to declining trust for any future projects or researchers. Considering the demonstrated risk of ‘research fatigue’ when participants have repeated engagements without any experience of change (Clark, 2008), projects need to have better planning and ethical considerations of the participants’ expectation and understand the risks if a project cannot meet them. This is both pragmatic to ensure longer term relationships and access to communities, but also ethically important to maintain the principle of ‘do no harm’.

Neglecting local context and norms

The technology proposed did not correlate with what the farmers cited as their biggest challenges in either case study, so it may not be an appropriate intervention. This constitutes a failure of top-down planning and thinking that is historically prevalent in the structure of NGO and development projects (Cole et al., 2014; Elliott, 1987; Kohl, 1991)

Farmers often claimed to be able to understand how their crops were responding to the soil, and in the rare cases where they followed recommendations from classrooms or laboratories they reported worse outcomes; they termed these recommendations to be ‘theoretical’ Wood et al. (2014) also found that farmers prefer experience and empirical knowledge derived from observation and practice rather than rational theoretical knowledge. The types of knowledge investigated by this project involved both a presumption of the gaps in knowledge and format that potentially neglected existing local knowledge. Failures such as these have a long history, for example projects that attempted to introduce ‘modern’ rice growing strategies to the local ‘subak’ system of management in Bali in the 1970s led to a crash in yield as it failed to account for local systems of water sharing and eventually caused droughts and conflicts, reducing trust in modern technology (Arthawiguna et al., 2005). In the 1980s projects were reflecting on the failure to integrate farmer knowledge and constraints into NGO agriculture projects (Kohl, 1991), yet the value of indigenous knowledge is still often ignored and researchers are still having to advocate for its inclusion (Adedipe et al., 2004; Nkomwa et al., 2014). A research project in Malawi showed how farmers used indicators such as the shedding of local tree species, behaviour of insects and other indicators to predict rains and planting times successfully (Nkomwa et al., 2014). Similarly, a study in Nigeria found that modern agricultural technologies would only be successful if they took into account the interplay of local knowledge of agricultural systems (Adedipe et al., 2004). Characterising the existing process of information gathering and decision making for farmers and integrating farmers into the design of information services may help to bridge the gap towards providing information systems that are useful.

The development research sector

Bidding for research projects and grants in both the sanitation and agricultural sectors will often require a ‘solution’ to be part of the proposal, which requires a presumption on the part of the researcher that a problem exists, often without the opportunity to test this with formative research. This means that research projects are often constrained to testing technical solutions with social research that was carried out alongside the soil testing rather than in advance of it. Projects that are well defined may still turn out to be incorrectly conceived if they are designed with a narrow scope of the problem without understanding the context. This can even damage relationships and induce research fatigue in the populations that the projects claim to be helping. A reformulation of funding calls to ensure that projects are responding to local context, and smaller ‘seed’ funds that enable researchers to identify such contexts with participatory research may help to prevent these issues.

Positivity bias and disciplinary silos in academia can prevent these lessons being learnt. Funders, the media and the public want a technology that will solve a problem, when the reality is that it needs to be addressed through a multifaceted scheme of interventions. Academics should be more impartial and not promote ‘silver bullet’ solutions. When initially presenting results from the fieldwork, trust was chosen as a major theme to explore at conferences, with the title ‘There’s not an app for trust’. At one conference this title was listed as ‘There is an app for trust’ by mistake, and at another, despite listing reasons for the technology not suiting the local context the only questions were about the price and how many tests the author would use per farm, missing that point that the authors were recommending not applying the app at all. When publishing the results, there is also a bias against failure as addressed explicitly in this special issue. In journals that review technology, even those that explicitly claim to be interdisciplinary, there is often an attitude that qualitative data ‘isn’t science’ or ‘are just opinions’. In an environment characterised by these issues the technical viability of the soil testing intervention was published as a separate paper (Mallory et al., 2022) potentially exacerbating the adoption of such technologies and echo chambers amongst technology advocates and advocates for understanding context first.