C LIMATE A DAPTATION AND C ONSERVATION

A GRICULTURE AMONG P ERUVIAN F ARMERS

H ELEENE T AMBET AND Y ANIV S TOPNITZKY

Peruvian agriculture will likely experience serious economic impacts of climate change, with changing
rainfall and temperature patterns forcing farmers to confront abnormal climate conditions. In this con-
text we study the impact of climate shocks on the agricultural practices of farmers who grow two main
staples: maize and potato. We focus on four types of agricultural techniques: (a) those that reduce soil
degradation, (b) those that conserve water, (c) the application of inorganic fertilizer, and (d) the appli-
cation of pesticides and herbicides. We combine three rounds of cross-sectional data from the Peru
National Agricultural Survey with long-term climate data to construct georeferenced shocks of abnor-
mal rainfall levels and variation. Our empirical strategy controls for time-invariant characteristics of
small localities, secular time trends, and farmer and farm characteristics to estimate how shocks affect
farmers’ choices in subsequent growing cycles. Our findings show that: (a) farmers reduce soil conser-
vation practices after one year of high rainfall, but multiple years of low rainfall increase adoption sig-
nificantly; (b) the rate of pesticide use increases by eight percentage points following a drought year but
is insensitive to multiple shock years; (c) water conservation measures are used less after high precip-
itation or when volatility was unusually low, and multiple years of insufficient rain tend to enhance this
response; and (d) fertilizer use is less sensitive than other outcomes to weather fluctuations. These find-
ings suggest that understanding how responsive farmers’ practices are to weather shocks can inform
policy design and help mitigate risks from changing weather patterns.

Key words: adaptation, agriculture, climate change, conservation, Peru.

JEL codes: O13, Q12, Q20, Q54.

Hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest
people depend directly on smallholder farm-
ing for their livelihoods. Such agricultural sys-
tems are tied to climate change through at
least two channels: on the one hand, agricul-
ture can play an important role in climate mit-
igation (World Bank 2015; Cohn et al. 2017),
whereas on the other, farmers must continu-
ally adapt to changing climate conditions.
These facts underline the need to understand
how farmers perceive and adapt to climate
change so as to guide future adaptation
Heleene Tambet at the International Food Policy Research Insti-
tute. Yaniv Stopnitzky is a professor in the Department of Eco-
nomics at the University of San Francisco. The authors thank the
editor, two anonymous referees, Laura Paul, Willy Pradel, Jesse
Anttila-Hughes, Alessandra Cassar, Edie Harris, Risa Okuyama,
Paulo Quadri, and participants at the 2018 Pacific Development
Economics Conference for numerous helpful discussions and con-
tributions that greatly improved this article. The authors have no
financial support to disclose.
Correspondence to be sent to: htambet@cgiar.org
strategies and policy responses that reduce
the negative impacts of changing weather pat-
terns (Lipper et al. 2017). Such on-farm
responses from smallholder households
include diversifying income among multiple
crops (Arslan, Belotti, and Lipper 2017),
changing the portfolio of crops/varieties and
livestock (Seo and Mendelsohn 2008;
Salazar-Espinoza, Jones, and Tarp 2015),
modifying planting times (Deressa
et al. 2009), adopting improved soil and water
conservation practices (Kurukulasuriya and
Rosenthal 2003; Arslan et al. 2015; Arslan,
Belotti, and Lipper 2017), and adjusting the
quantity of inputs applied (Salazar-Espinoza,
Jones, and Tarp 2015; Aragón, Oteiza, and
Rud 2018).
In this global context, the Stern Review
identified Peru as one of the countries most
vulnerable to climate change (Stern
et al. 2006). 8.9 million people (29% of the

Amer. J. Agr. Econ. 103(3): 900–922; doi:10.1111/ajae.12177

Published online January 4, 2021
© 2021 Agricultural and Applied Economics Association
Tambet and Stopnitzky
population of 31 million) are involved in agri-
culture, a sector particularly vulnerable to
extreme heat and increasing water shortages.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) Special Report on Emissions
Scenarios estimated that Peru will experience
the greatest change in temperature levels
among all South American countries, with a
predicted increase of 0.7
C to 1.8
C by 2020
and 1
C to 4
C by 2050 (Nakicenovic
et al. 2000). Indeed, evidence exists of climatic
changes already underway: weather-related
emergencies in Peru became six times more
frequent between 1997 and 2006 as rainfall
patterns shifted, and Peru’s glaciers, an impor-
tant source of water runoff, have lost over one-
third of their surface area since 1970 (Sanabria
and Lhomme 2013; USAID 2017). Mean-
while, climatic changes have already resulted
in range expansion for important pests (Perez
et al. 2010).
In response to these threats, stakeholders
have identified Climate Smart Agriculture
(CSA) as a potential coping mechanism
(World Bank 2015). CSA is a multipronged
approach that varies by local context, but
farming practices are broadly considered
CSA if they maintain or improve productivity
and so contribute either to climate adaptation
and/or a reduction in greenhouse gas emis-
sions (FAO 2013; World Bank 2015). Adap-
tive measures related to soils focus on
reducing soil erosion losses, increasing access
to irrigation for buffering of short-term
droughts, and improving the ability of soil to
conserve crop-available water and nutrients
(Perez et al. 2010). In this article, we study
the adoption of specific farming practices
using data collected by Peru’s National Agri-
cultural Survey because the Peruvian govern-
ment deems these practices desirable from a
conservation perpsective. Our main outcomes
thus reflect CSA objectives as well Peruvian
national policy priorities in conservation
practices.
Although many agricultural practices might
increase the adaptive capacity of farming sys-
tems, their adoption and implementation are
likely to be costly for smallholders, especially
in the short run (McCarthy, Lipper, and
Branca 2011). To better understand autono-
mous adoption of practices with CSA poten-
tial to aid in climate adaptation, this article
examines whether farmers spontaneously
change their production behavior following
unusual weather realizations. We identify
these effects by studying repeated cross-
Climate and Conservation Agriculture in Peru 901
sections of agricultural survey data that are
representative of all households in the Peru-
vian Andes. We combine these data with
high-resolution climate data that span the last
thirty years, which allow us to identify spa-
tially and temporally comparable weather
shocks with high precision. We then measure
how farm-level changes in conservation prac-
tices differ over time for those who receive cer-
tain weather shock(s) as compared to those
that do not. We focus on smallholder farmers
in the highland Andes region, which is both
sensitive to climate change and a region where
Peru’s two main staples–potato and maize–are
intensively cultivated.
Our results show that Peruvian farmers’
reliance on soil conservation measures
declines after unusually high rainfall but does
not change after a year of unusually low rain-
fall; neither high nor low rainfall volatility
appears to affect these soil measures. On the
other hand, multiple years of drought shocks
cause farmers to increase soil conservation
practices. We estimate an average treatment
effect on adoption of 0.06 standard deviations
in a composite index of soil practices for every
additional year of extremely high or low rain-
fall in the past five years. Water conservation,
meanwhile, declines with high and low rainfall
shocks as well as unusually low volatility,
though repeated exposure to drought years
in a recent five-year period improved water-
related practices. Pesticide use increases fol-
lowing a low rainfall shock and, conditional
on rainfall levels, decreases after a year of
unusual volatility. Fertilizer application, in
contrast to the other measures, appears rela-
tively insensitive to weather realizations
except unusually low rainfall levels in recent
years.
The main contribution of this study is to
show that farmers adapt in specific ways as a
response to weather variability, which, we
argue, provides valuable lessons regarding
how they might adapt to climate change. Rela-
tively little empirical work examines the cli-
matic factors that lead farmers to adopt
different practices (Arslan, Belotti, and
Lipper 2017; Lipper et al. 2017), yet for public
policy it is important to differentiate between
adaptations that farmers undertake spontane-
ously, that is, as a regular part of ongoing man-
agement, from those that are consciously and
specifically planned under climate-related
risks (Smit and Skinner 2002). What is
currently known in this area has largely
come from African countries (Hassan and
902 May 2021
Nhemachena 2008; Seo et al. 2008; Deressa
et al. 2009; Kassie et al. 2013; Teklewold, Kas-
sie, and Shiferaw 2013; Arslan et al. 2014;
Asfaw et al. 2014), whereas quantitative ana-
lyses of South American farmers’ responses
to weather shocks are rare. Two exceptions
are Aragón, Oteiza, and Rud (2018), which
focuses exclusively on extreme heat in Peru
and examines how farmers modify input
choices to deal with this particular form of
shock, and Ponce (2020), which studies
Peruvian farmers’ choices regarding crop
diversity on their fields in response to
increases in intraseasonal climate variability.
Methodologically, three features of our
study enhance its contribution to the existing
literature. First, we use a large-scale and
regionally representative plot-level survey
data that, to the best of our knowledge, has
not been used previously in economic studies.
Second, the climate data we rely on have the
highest possible spatial resolution currently
available for the area. Third, as distinct from
previous studies, we focus on a wide variety
of farming practices but construct summary
indices that combine multiple, possibly corre-
lated outcomes into a single index rather than
analyzing each practice separately, thereby
avoiding concerns about multiple testing and
optimistic family-wise rejection rates to which
insufficient attention has been paid in the liter-
ature. These characteristics of our empirical
work reflect improvements on the current lit-
erature that could be usefully incorporated
into future studies.
Climate, Weather, and Farmer Decision
Making
This section reviews the literature on the rela-
tionship among farmer decision making,
weather, and climate.
Understanding Weather Patterns
Adaptation is the response of economic agents
and societies to political and economic shocks
(e.g. famine) or major environmental changes
(e.g. climate change) (Zilberman, Zhao, and
Heiman 2012). With respect to weather, it con-
sists of adjustments that agents make to cope
with a change in the expected weather distri-
bution (Burke and Lobell 2010; Dell, Jones,
and Olken 2014; Hsiang 2016).
Amer. J. Agr. Econ.
The literature on the impacts of weather on
agriculture has generally relied on two main
approaches. The first relies on production
functions that specify a relationship between
climate and agricultural output, and then uses
these functions to simulate the impacts of
changing weather outcomes. This method
makes it difficult to include farmers’ behav-
ioral responses, however, and thus suffers
from “dumb farmer bias,” where adaptations
that many farmers make in response to chang-
ing economic and environmental conditions
are not incorporated into the models
(Mendelsohn, Nordhaus, and Shaw 1994;
Maddison 2007; Dell, Jones, and
Olken 2014). By contrast, the second
approach, based on the Ricardian method,
tends to assume too much in the other direc-
tion: in particular, that farmers costlessly
adopt the best technology available given
the new weather (Mendelsohn, Nordhaus,
and Shaw 1994).
Additional research is needed to under-
stand the range of farmers’ behavioral
responses, including learning, risk manage-
ment, and other forms of adaptation, which
farmers turn to when faced with short- and
long-run changes in the climate (Zilberman,
Zhao, and Heiman 2012; Asfaw et al. 2014).
Limited information exists on central ques-
tions such as how economic agents perceive
weather realizations and how they adjust their
expectations in response.
For example, Maddison (2007) notes that a
farmer may perceive several hot summers but
rationally attribute them to random variation
in a stationary climate, whereas in another sit-
uation a farmer might adapt by changing her
production decisions immediately. Perhaps
farmers engage in simple Bayesian updating
of their prior beliefs according to the standard
formula, which would suggest a slow process
of adaptation (Conley and Udry 2010).
Another possibility arises in studies of input
and crop choices, namely that farmers exhibit
a form of recency bias and place more weight
on recent information than is efficient
(Maddison 2007). In support of this view,
Cohen, Etner, and Jeleva (2008) argue that
perceptions can be understood as derived
from a sequence of past events, and so we
expect risk evaluation by individuals to
depend on the sequence of past experiences.
According to this view, droughts, floods, and
other climate hazards occurring in the recent
past are likely to shape farmers’ perceptions
regarding the current riskiness of their
Tambet and Stopnitzky
environment (Maddison 2007; Cohen, Etner,
and Jeleva 2008). This study directly incorpo-
rates these myriad possibilities in the construc-
tion of our weather variables.
Once climatic changes are perceived, a dis-
crete choice among major response alterna-
tives becomes the heart of the farm
household adaptation process (Asfaw
et al. 2014). These decisions are essentially
adoption decisions, as Feder, Just, and Zilber-
man (1985) and others emphasize. The pace
and extent of these adoption decisions will
depend on agents’ adaptive capacity, “the abil-
ity of a system to prepare for stresses and
changes in advance, or adjust and respond to
the effects caused by the stresses … so as to
decrease vulnerability,” that is, to manage
and influence resilience (Smit et al. 1999).
Empirical Studies of Adaptation
Empirical studies of farming practices and cli-
mate change are still sparse, but a recent,
emerging body of work builds on the literature
discussed above. Although the first round of
economic assessments of climate change
impacts did not adequately account for the role
of human behavior to offset the effects of envi-
ronmental change (Zilberman, Zhao, and Hei-
man 2012; Dell, Jones, and Olken 2014), recent
studies show that farmers do perceive the
changing climate and take actions to reduce
negative impacts (Asfaw et al. 2014). Similar
modeling approaches to the agricultural tech-
nology adoption literature have now also been
employed in climate change studies
(Zilberman, Zhao, and Heiman 2012).
An important focus has been on the fact that
sustainable land management techniques can
be viewed as a way of dealing with agricultural
risk. As identified in an extensive literature
(e.g. Moschini and Hennessy [2001]; Chavas
and Nauges [2020]), uncertainty over agricul-
tural outcomes affects production behavior,
in particular among risk-averse farmers, as
poor farmers often are, who lack access to risk
mitigation strategies such as crop insurance.
Because of this property, one could expect
that greater variability in rainfall and higher
maximum temperatures increase conservation
practices (Asfaw et al. 2014), though ones with
costly, upfront costs might lag behind due to
farmers’ aversion to make costly and uncertain
investments in their plots.
Although only implicitly related to climate
change, a number of studies have analyzed
Climate and Conservation Agriculture in Peru 903
factors that affect the adoption of conservation
measures in agriculture (Ervin and Ervin 1982;
Knowler and Bradshaw 2007; McCarthy,
Lipper, and Branca 2011). Until recently,
these studies were exclusively cross-sectional
ex post adoption studies that suffered from
small sample sizes and that typically failed to
address issues of endogeneity arising from
omitted variable bias (Knowler and
Bradshaw 2007; Zilberman, Zhao, and
Heiman 2012).1
To overcome the identification challenges
faced in these studies, a growing literature
has begun to rely on panel data, high-
resolution weather data, or both
(Auffhammer et al. 2013). These data allow
researchers to control for unobserved time-
invariant characteristics of locations or house-
holds and rely on weather realizations as plau-
sibly exogenous shocks to farmers. Using such
methods, Arslan et al. (2014) provides evi-
dence for a positive correlation between rain-
fall variability and the selection of sustainable
land management type practices. Kassie
et al. (2008) analyze the impact of production
risk arising from weather shocks on the adop-
tion of conservation agriculture as well as use
of inorganic fertilizer; they find that risk deters
adoption of fertilizer but has no effect on the
conservation agriculture adoption decision. Seo
and Mendelsohn (2008) and Kurukulasuriya
and Rosenthal (2003), using data of South
American and African farmers respectively,
show that crop choices are highly sensitive to
changes in precipitation and temperature under
different climate change scenarios. Di Falco and
Veronesi (2013) find that crop adaptation mea-
sures (e.g. switching crops, adopting water-
harvesting technologies, adopting soil conserva-
tion) are more effective when implemented
along with a portfolio of sustainable land man-
agement practices rather than in isolation.
Similarly, Salazar-Espinoza, Jones, and
Tarp (2015) analyze shock responses among
small-holders in Mozambique. They find that
farmers shift land use away from non-staple
crops one year after a weather shock, whereas
two years later they tend to switch back to
non-staple crops again. Asfaw et al. (2014) find
that higher variation in rainfall and tempera-
ture affects the choice of risk-reducing agricul-
tural practices such as soil and water
1
Examples include Hassan and Nhemachena (2008)’s study of
adaptation options in South Africa, Deressa et al. (2009)’s study
of adaptation in the Nile basin of Ethiopia, and Posthumus, Gar-
debroek, and Ruben (2010) in Peru.
904 May 2021
conservation practices, and that wealthier
households and those with secure land rights
are more likely to adopt sustainable land man-
agement practices. Most closely related to this
study, Arslan et al. (2014) examine a set of
potentially climate-smart agricultural prac-
tices in Zambia by using socioeconomic panel
data in conjunction with georeferenced data
on historical rainfall and temperature. They
find that following a shock, the use of modern
inputs (seeds and fertilizers) is significantly
reduced, whereas soil conservation practices
and crop rotation do not change.2
Agriculture and Climate Change in the
Peruvian Highlands
As indicated above, the IPCC and the Stern
Review identified Peru as being among the
countries most vulnerable to the adverse
impacts of changing weather patterns. The
potential economic impacts are massive. The
Human Development Report, for example, sug-
gests that a 2
C increase in the maximum tem-
perature and 20% increase in the variability of
rainfall by 2020 would lower Peru’s GDP by
20% and 23.4%, respectively (UNDP 2013).
One characteristic of Peru that exacerbates this
situation is the fact it is among the Latin Ameri-
can countries with the most limited water
resources—and the situation is especially severe
in the highlands region (McCarthy 2015).
Normally, glaciers store water in the rainy
season and release it throughout the year,
whereas in current glacial retreat conditions,
flooding is often caused by too much water
being released over the rainy season and
drought by not enough water being released
during the dry season (USAID 2017). More
than 80% of highlands’ farmers rely on rain-
fed subsistence agriculture and irrigation infra-
structure is absent or insufficient, meaning that
changes in precipitation and melting glaciers
increasingly result in competition over water
resources (MINAM 2010; USAID 2017).
Potatoes are highly sensitive to the timing of
water availability. During early stages of plant
growth and tuber initiation, the shallow root
system is sensitive to small deficiencies,
whereas later in the growth cycle a frequent
problem is too much water, which can cause
2
Interestingly, their analysis of farm productivity shows that
intercropping significantly reduces the probability of low yields
when a household is under critical weather stress, which suggests
its potential as an adaptation measure (Arslan et al. 2014).
Amer. J. Agr. Econ.
various forms of rot, such as blight and malfor-
mations.3 Despite this time sensitivity, overall
rainfall levels over the growing season impact
potato production substantially; one study
found that decreases in total seasonal water
had substantial impacts on yields, and more
uniform water delivery can help mitigate the
effects of too little water (Ojala, Stark, and
Kleinkopf 1990).
Another potentially worrisome change for
potato and maize cultivation is heightened
pest pressure. Although pests have always
been a challenge for Andean farmers, climate
change has resulted in expansion in the ranges
of important pests such as moths and the
Andean potato weevil (Perez et al. 2010).
Studies show that Peruvian smallholders
perceive that the climate is changing and that
they link these changes to pest problems. A
broad consensus exists that extreme weather
events are now more frequent and weather
patterns more unpredictable (Painter 2007).
Nearly 50% of households in Peru believe that
climate change has resulted in an expansion of
the range of major pests (Oxfam Novib 2013),
and the FAO reports that nine of the main
crops in Peru—including the key staples of
potato and maize—will suffer from significant
yield losses under all six considered future cli-
mate change scenarios (FAO 2017). Results
from Saldarriaga (2016) suggest that variabil-
ity rather than absolute levels of climate indi-
cators have a greater effect on agricultural
productivity in Peru.
Building on this literature and the heteroge-
neity of natural conditions and crop composi-
tions in Peru (World Bank 2015;
Saldarriaga 2016; MINAGRI 2018), this arti-
cle focuses on two main staple crops: potato
and maize, together accounting for about
one-fourth of the 3.5 million hectares used
for agriculture in Peru (McCarthy 2014).
Sixty-four percent of farmers live in the
Andean region and use subsistence, rain-fed
methods to grow these two most prevalent sta-
ple crops UNDP (2013). The cultivation areas
of both crops have high social and geographi-
cal sensitivity because of poverty and innate
sensitivity to natural shocks (Sanabria and
Lhomme 2013; CIAT 2015). Under current
climate change predictions, therefore, potato
and maize are estimated to lose their climatic
suitability in many current cultivation areas
3
This comment summarizes statements made by a representa-
tive of Ontario’s Potato Board.
Tambet and Stopnitzky
in Peru (Nakicenovic et al. 2000). The produc-
tion risk for potato is believed to be especially
high due to several recurrent factors such as
drought, flooding, hail, and frost (Oxfam
Novib 2013). Despite these threats, the rate
of explicit agricultural adaptation to climate
change appears to be low: a recent household
survey suggests that only 15% of farmers have
deliberately adopted adaptive behaviors,
though most households report using one or
more production practices considered to be
climate adaptive (Wheeler 2017).
Climate Smart Agriculture and Farming
Practices of Interest
Given the range of agricultural activities that
could conceivably count as CSA, in this article
we focus on practices that are (a) widely viewed
by stakeholders—in particular, the government
of Peru, as well as the FAO, World Bank, and
CGIAR—as conservation behaviors with
adaptive potential and economic significance,
and (b) included in the Peru National Agricul-
tural Survey as “good agricultural practices”
(FAO 2013; Rosenstock et al. 2016).
The first grouping we analyze is comprised
of four desirable soil conservation practices
as identified and measured in the survey. Each
of these practices has the ultimate goal of
maintaining or enhancing the organic matter
content of soils, especially in unpredictable or
adverse water conditions.
Crop rotations. This practice is meant to
ensure differential nutrient uptake between
crops, increase soil organic matter (and there-
fore carbon) content, and thus to reduce
dependency on chemical fertilization
(McCarthy, Lipper, and Branca 2011). In the
Peruvian highlands, crop rotation protects soil
during intense rainfall events by absorbing the
water and reducing runoff, and during periods
of drought by mitigating wind erosion. Rota-
tions also decrease crops’ vulnerability to pests
and weed problems. This particular feature of
crop rotation is already important given cur-
rent experiences of pest infestations in the
highlands, which are attributable to climate
change (MINAM 2010; Clements et al. 2011).
Application of organic matter. The addition of
organic matter to soil is a low-emission, low-
cost amendment that supports soil structure,
restores its nutrients, increases the soil’s water-
holding capacity, and reduces moisture losses in
Climate and Conservation Agriculture in Peru 905
times of water scarcity (Arslan, Belotti, and
Lipper 2017). It is thus valuable in upholding pro-
ductivity in areas that are commonly hit by
droughts (Clements et al. 2011). Like crop rota-
tions, the application of organic matter application
is also beneficial for both excesses and dearths of
water, as the practice minimizes nutrient loss
during heavy rains. Altieri et al. (2015) highlight
experiences from Guatemala, Brazil, and Hondu-
ras where organic fertilization led to 20–250%
higher maize yields, and Scialabba and
Hattam (2002) found that potato yields with added
organic matter increased by 250% in Bolivia.
Terrace construction. Terracing is an agricultural
practice that reduces soil erosion and promotes
accumulation of organic matter in soils. Most
importantly, however, is that it facilitates adapta-
tion to climate change by optimizing water use
(Clements et al. 2011). Terraced fields keep soil
damp and soil temperatures stable, while also
increasing water retention. Using terraces thus
helps farmers cope with both droughts and abnor-
mally heavy rains (Arslan, Belotti, and Lip-
per 2017; Singh and Singh 2017). In the absence
of terracing, heavy rainfall paired with poor soil
management can lead to land- and mudslides;
these risks are mitigated by terraces that fight ero-
sion (Clements et al. 2011). For example, Altieri
et al. (2015) show that the restoration of Incan ter-
races in Andean communities led to a 43–65%
percent yield increase in potatoes and maize in the
first year, while Clements et al. (2011) cite yield
increases of 13.2% and 19.8% for potatoes and
maize, respectively, in Peru.
Soil analysis. Taking soil samples and analyz-
ing them is a practice not commonly included
under the auspices of climate-smart practices
but is of local interest to the Peruvian govern-
ment. Soil analysis is beneficial in assessing soil
fertility and enabling farmers to recognize
insufficient or excessive use of inputs and to
adjust their practices accordingly. However,
the current adoption rate of this practice is still
very low, with rates hovering near 2% during
the study period. Because it is a priority identi-
fied by the Peruvian National Institute of Statis-
tics and Informatics (INEI), we include it in our
summary index measure (described below).4
Water conservation. The second broad area of
agricultural practices is a cluster of behaviors
4
All of our results are robust to excluding it from the summary
index.
906 May 2021
aimed at reducing water usage. As with soil
conservation, the survey identifies four prac-
tices that conserve water: (a) determining
plants’ water needs prior to season, (b) deter-
mining watering times, (c) measuring irriga-
tion, and (d) maintaining irrigation systems.
These four behaviors are all simple, labor-
intensive, but low-cost ways to cope with upcom-
ing water shortages (Singh and Singh 2017). How-
ever, in contrast to the soil practices that could
target different climatic adversities, the water prac-
tices are rather homogeneous in that they work
toward one end goal of making agricultural water
use as efficient as possible. Proper water manage-
ment can help capture more rainfall, use it more
efficiently, and make the maximum amount avail-
able to crops. One meta-analysis of climate-smart
practices’ estimates the average marginal increase
in yields from adoption of water management
practices to be in the range of 92% in dry areas
and 164% in humid areas (McCarthy, Lipper,
and Branca 2011).
Chemical inputs. In addition to the traditional,
labor-intensive but presumably low-cost prac-
tices, we also look at application of chemical
inputs—synthetic fertilizer and pesticides.
These are inputs addressing shorter term pro-
ductivity concerns of farmers that might follow
weather shocks. In the short run, the produc-
tivity effect of chemical fertilizer is deemed to
be superior to that of organic fertilizer, but
over longer time horizons the latter appears
to be more beneficial in maintaining stable
land productivity and reducing soil depletion
(Arslan, Belotti, and Lipper 2017). The litera-
ture typically finds that fertilizer use increases
yields, but the majority of this evidence is gath-
ered under average climatic conditions. The
superiority of inorganic fertilizer under harsh
climatic conditions—which are expected to
get worse under climate change—still requires
more research, though environmental con-
cerns over soil depletion from synthetic inputs
lead to arguments that crop nutrient require-
ments should not be met solely through min-
eral fertilizers (Clements et al. 2011; Arslan,
Belotti, and Lipper 2017).
As an example of the climate and context spec-
ificity of farmer responses related to chemical
inputs, Asfaw et al. (2014) find that the productiv-
ity increasing effects of inorganic fertilizer decrease
significantly under false rainfall onsets in small-
holder maize systems of Malawi. On the other
hand, Arslan, Belotti, and Lipper et al. (2017) find
that soil and water conservation practices are
important components of combinations of
Amer. J. Agr. Econ.
practices that result in improved yields following
weather shocks, that is, inputs like chemical fertil-
izers function better in combination with addi-
tional sustainable practices.5
Data and Variable Construction
Our empirical analysis uses three data sources.
The first is a household survey conducted by
the Peruvian National Institute of Statistics and
Informatics (INEI). These data provide our pri-
mary measures of farm characteristics and agri-
cultural practices. The second and third data
sources are remote sensing data used to con-
struct climate and weather variables. They are,
respectively, the Climate Hazards Group Infra-
Red Precipitation with Station (CHIRPS) and
the Center for Environmental Data Analysis
(CEDA) for temperature data.
Socioeconomic Data
The Peru National Agricultural Survey is a
nationally representative survey implemented
as a repeated cross-section in 2014, 2015, and
2016. Each year the survey sampled 25,000
households total—1,000 randomly selected
households from each department in the
country—in accordance with the sample frame
of the 2012 Agricultural Census. Our sample
excludes large agricultural operations with
land sizes bigger than 50 hectares as well as
households that do not grow either potatoes
or maize. We further restrict the sample to
the mountainous, highland region, an area
where potatoes and maize cultivation domi-
nate; poverty levels are relatively high; and
so is characterized by both geographical and
socioeconomic vulnerability to climate
change. Our inclusion criteria result in a sam-
ple of 10,115 households in 2014, 11,076
households in 2015, and 11,588 in 2016.6 The
survey included detailed questions on all crop
and livestock operations for every plot for
5
With respect to pesticides, Perez et al. (2010) suggest that
farmers’ ability to control pests may be inhibited by reductions in
pesticides’ effectiveness due to different humidity levels (the tim-
ing and amount of rain following application), which may lead to
yet greater pesticide use, and which in turn may then lead to more
rapid development of pesticide resistance.
6
Despite the intentional equal sample size of 25,000 households
for each national cross-section, the actual sample size increased
over years. The slightly increasing sample size used in this study
thus reflects a proportionate change in potato/maize growers
across survey years.
Tambet and Stopnitzky
each household. Summary statistics for the
socioeconomic data can be seen in table 1.
Households in this survey are located within
small spatial units called conglomerados.
These units have higher spatial precision than
the smallest administrative units in the country
(districts) and therefore households within a
conglomerado face less heterogeneous geo-
graphical and climatic conditions than do
households in a typical district. In the highland
region on which we focus, there are 892 con-
glomerados in 2014, 1,173 conglomerados for
2015, and 1,176 for 2016.7
All INEI survey rounds are conducted dur-
ing the Southern hemisphere’s winter months
so that households report on their activities
during the season that has just ended.8 The cur-
rent year thus refers to the twelve-month
period leading up to the survey9; we use this
twelve-month period in the calculation of all
annual weather variables for all the thirty years
in our data. Similarly, the previous year’s shock
refers to the twelve months prior to the agricul-
tural year that ended at the time of survey. We
provide a graphical depiction of these timelines
in online supplementary appendix figure S1.
Climate Data
Our climate data are derived from two
sources. First, we use monthly rainfall totals
from the InfraRed Precipitation with Station
product, a second generation dataset from
the Climate Hazard Group. It contains quasi-
global rainfall data that dates back to 1981
and combines records from satellites and
ground stations (Funk et al. 2015). The data
have a resolution of 3000 (equal to half a nauti-
cal mile, or roughly one kilometer at the equa-
tor) and daily temporal resolution. We
extracted records for monthly aggregated
values covering the thirty-year period between
1986 and 2016. After pre-processing the data
for the right projection, we extract values from
interpolated surfaces for the longitude and lat-
itude coordinates of all the conglomerados.
7
As the spatial units have perfect overlap for 2015 and 2016 but
not 2014, we matched and calibrated 2014 conglomerados using a
nearest neighbor spatial distance algorithm. If two potential
matches were available, we optimize the choice to achieve the min-
imal total distance between all the pairs. All resultant pairs were
within 10 kilometers from each other.


8
Due to Peru’s latitude of 4 S, maize and potatoes are both
planted in October and, to a lesser extent, November, and typically
harvested after March (Ministerio de Agricultura y Riego 2017).
9
The survey was conducted from May 30 to July 1 in the Andes
region. Following these dates, we define the previous
twelve months as previous year’s June up to current year’s May.
Climate and Conservation Agriculture in Peru 907
In addition to the rainfall data, we use tempera-
ture data from the CEDA Web Services frame-
work, a high-resolution, gridded observational
climate record with a temporal resolution of one
month (i.e. featuring monthly means) and a spatial
resolution of 50 (five nautical miles, or roughly
10 km, at the equator). We again extract tempera-
ture records for the thirty-year period between
1986 and 2016, and match the temperature mea-
sures with each conglomerado. Though our tem-
perature data have lower resolution than the
precipitation data, temperature has less spatial var-
iation than does precipitation, especially in rugged
areas like Peru, so this differing resolution is not a
concern (Dell, Jones, and Olken 2014).
Construction of Weather Variables
Motivated by the literature review above, we con-
struct weather shocks in the following manner.
The most common approach in the economics lit-
erature has been to define shocks as deviations
from the long-term normal, where the threshold
level of deviation is open for interpretation
(McKee, Doesken, and Kleist 1993; Auffhammer
et al. 2013). For our calculations of climate vari-
ables, we use the thirty-year reference period of
1986–2016, a length of time that the literature sug-
gests is sufficient to be insensitive to recent shocks,
but not so long as to misrepresent the current local
climatic conditions (Auffhammer et al. 2013;Dell,
Jones, and Olken 2014; Salazar-Espinoza, Jones,
and Tarp 2015).
For rainfall, we rely on the the Standard
Precipitation Index (SPI), a drought index
first developed in McKee, Doesken, and
Kleist (1993), which is now in common use
and recommended by the World Meteorologi-
cal Organization for dry spell monitoring
(Zhang et al. 2011). SPI is expressed as the
number of standard deviations that the
observed precipitation deviates from the
long-term—in this case, thirty-year mean—
for normalized annual values (Salazar-Espinoza,
Jones, and Tarp 2015). There are different
thresholds below which a shortfall in precipita-
tion can be considered a negative rainfall shock
(McKee, Doesken, and Kleist 1993).10 In our
analysis, we follow the SPI methodology but
restrict our measures to a threshold of +1.00 to
serve as a simple, easily interpretable value
10
Zhang et al. (2011) suggest an interpretation where an SPI
value above or below +0.80 (standard deviations) indicates wet/-
dry weather outcomes, whereas SPI values above or below +1.60
indicate extremely wet/dry weather outcomes.
908 May 2021 Amer. J. Agr. Econ.

Table 1. Summary Statistics of Farmer Characteristics

2014 2015 2016 Full sample
Male household head 0.69 (0.46) 0.69 (0.46) 0.68 (0.47) 0.69 (0.46)
Age of household head 51.91 (15.93) 52.65 (15.42) 52.99 (15.27) 52.54 (15.53)
Primary school or less 0.80 (0.40) 0.80 (0.40) 0.79 (0.41) 0.80 (0.40)
Indigenous 0.65 (0.48) 0.60 (0.49) 0.62 (0.49) 0.62 (0.49)
Experience (years) 26.03 (15.45) 27.20 (15.01) 27.55 (15.09) 26.96 (15.19)
Household size 3.83 (2.08) 3.75 (2.05) 3.73 (2.01) 3.77 (2.04)
Distance to center (hours) 1.43 (1.84) 1.64 (2.14) 1.55 (1.85) 1.54 (1.95)
Land tenure (1 = own) 0.65 (0.48) 0.67 (0.47) 0.61 (0.49) 0.64 (0.48)
Total land area (ha) . (.) 2.81 (6.26) 2.92 (6.16) 2.87 (6.21)
Number of plots 3.19 (3.25) 4.10 (3.66) 4.56 (3.74) 3.98 (3.61)
Number of crops per plot 1.76 (1.27) 1.98 (1.53) 2.08 (1.67) 1.95 (1.52)
Maize farmer 0.61 (0.49) 0.63 (0.48) 0.63 (0.48) 0.63 (0.48)
Potato farmer 0.61 (0.49) 0.63 (0.48) 0.65 (0.48) 0.63 (0.48)
Technical irrigation 0.51 (0.50) 0.51 (0.50) 0.53 (0.50) 0.52 (0.50)
Livestock ownership 0.85 (0.36) 0.88 (0.32) 0.88 (0.32) 0.87 (0.33)
Received extension services 0.16 (0.36) 0.12 (0.33) 0.09 (0.28) 0.12 (0.33)
Cooperative membership 0.04 (0.20) 0.03 (0.18) 0.04 (0.19) 0.04 (0.19)
Credit access 0.10 (0.30) 0.09 (0.29) 0.10 (0.29) 0.10 (0.29)
Savings account 0.05 (0.21) 0.21 (0.41) 0.24 (0.43) 0.17 (0.38)
Observations 10,115 11,076 11,588 32,779
Notes: Unweighted sample averages reported with standard errors in parentheses. Credit access refers to the percentage of households who requested credit and
also received it during the preceding year. Receiving extension applies for the preceding three years. Number of crops is averaged over all plots that a household
owns. Data on area of cultivated land and value of crop sales were only collected in 2015 and 2016.

widely used in the prior literature (Dell, Jones,
and Olken 2014; Salazar-Espinoza, Jones, and
Tarp 2015).11
In addition to the shocks defined by rainfall
levels, we study how unusual variation in
rainfall—a widely observed expression of cli-
mate change in Peru—affects farmers’ behav-
ior. We construct a measure of volatility
based on the coefficient of variation (CV) of
rainfall.12 Rainfall CV for a given period is cal-
culated as the standard deviation divided by
the mean of the respective period’s rainfall.
This method provides a comparable measure
of variation for households that may have
experienced different rainfall levels (Asfaw
et al. 2014).13 We then define a shock to be a
11
The weather data resolution is at the polygon/cell level (each
roughly 5 sq. nautical miles). Meanwhile, The household survey
data provides an (x,y) coordinate pair for each conglomerado
(but not for each household). To provide the best match possible,
we extracted values of weather indicators from interpolated sur-
faces for every conglomerado point, where extraction used bilin-
ear interpolation from neighboring cells to every conglomerado
to better reflect local variability. A visual representation of these
shocks for the year 2016 is provided in Figure 1.
12
Coefficient of variation as been used previously in studies of
conservation agriculture as a measure that can explain adoption
(Arslan et al. 2014; Asfaw et al. 2014; Arslan, Belotti, and
Lipper 2017).
13
As with the SPI, the coefficient of variation is calculated from
monthly data by dividing the standard deviation of monthly rain-
fall over the monthly mean rainfall for a given year; for example,
the standard deviation of monthly rainfall for 2016 is divided by
the mean monthly rainfall for 2016. This formula yields a z-score
of variation for each year under study. As an extension to this
CV z-score that is ± one standard deviation
above the mean variation for the thirty-year
period.14 This measure has the benefit of being
comparable across both space and time, and
thus being easily interpretable. To help char-
acterize the extent to which households expe-
rienced different types of shocks, we provide
data in the online supplementary appendix
(p. 58) that shows the proportions of conglom-
erados that experienced the different shocks
we analyze in this article.
Construction of Outcome Measures
We focus on four soil conservation practices
and four water conservation practices—all
identified by the National Agricultural
Survey—plus the application of chemical fer-
tilizer and pesticides, which together sum to a
total of ten outcomes. Studying the impact of
each of these practices separately would result
in ten different hypotheses of varying but
ambiguous individual importance, which runs
approach, we standardize each location’s CV over the thirty-year
time period 1986–2016.
14
Our motivation for including a shock that is unusually low var-
iation in rainfall is the idea farmers’ might detect any substantive
change from the long-term norm. With that said, it is possible that
detecting a year as having unusually low variation is somewhat
more subtle, and possibly more difficult, than noticing a year with
unusually high variation.
Tambet and Stopnitzky
the risk of bias arising from model selection
and a higher probability of Type 1 errors.
To address this statistical challenge, we use a
method that constructs summary indices that
group related variables together (Anderson
2008). The method combines similar variables:
in our case, the four water conservation variables
are grouped together, the four soil conservation
measures are combined, and fertilizer and pesti-
cide use remain as binary indicators that take
the value one if a household applied the respec-
tive input during the season of interest. The sum-
mary index weights each contribution by the
inverse-covariance matrix, giving higher weight
to those variables less correlated with each other
and maximizing the amount of information incor-
porated into the final index. This method is robust
to over-testing while allowing for more powerful
tests. Note that because all variables are stan-
dardized and normalized prior to weighting and
incorporation in the index, effect sizes are inter-
preted in terms of standard deviations.15
Empirical Strategy
Our identification strategy controls for system-
atic differences across conglomerados in terms
of agroecological conditions, average agricul-
tural practices, secular time trends, and other
unobserved, time-invariant characteristics of
these small spatial units. We identify the
causal effect of weather shocks on farmer
behavior as changes that occur across years
in response to a particular shock relative to
the within-conglomerado average and com-
pare these responses to changes in conglomer-
ados that did not receive the weather shock.
Our identifying assumption is thus that
within-year differences across conglomerados
who receive bad versus good/neutral shocks
are, once controlling for within-locality aver-
ages, uncorrelated with our weather shock
variables. In other words, our empirical strat-
egy relies on the assumption that a weather
shock is as good as randomly assigned condi-
tional on observed characteristics and unob-
served characteristics controlled for by our
15
Given the specific adaptive functions of the four soil practices,
it can be argued that one type of weather shock could induce dif-
ferent responses in individual soil practices (water practices in con-
trast, are complementary in their nature and all aim to ensure that
the maximum amount of water is available for crops). To study this
possibility, we also show shock responses by individual soil prac-
tices in the online supplementary appendix.
Climate and Conservation Agriculture in Peru 909
location and time dummy variables, that is,
cov(uict, WSct) = 0. Given the difficulty of pre-
dicting weather patterns in terms of levels, vol-
atility, or frequency within a particular
conglomerado over time, we argue this identi-
fying assumption is reasonable. Nevertheless,
we later present a number of robustness
checks and placebo tests to lend further sup-
port to our identification strategy.
Estimation
Using variation over time within a given spa-
tial entity, our analysis implicitly assumes a cli-
mate model where level changes matter in
proportion to an area’s usual variation, not
their absolute levels (Dell, Jones, and
Olken 2014). Pooling households survey
rounds, we estimate models with conglomer-
ado and year dummies, which control for
unobserved characteristics of conglomerados
as well as secular changes in the country.
Our main empirical specification takes the
following form:
ð1Þ Y pict = α + βWSc,t − 1 + δX ic + T t + Cc + uict
where Y indicates one of the four outcomes of
interest p (water conservation index, soil conser-
vation index, fertilizer use, and pesticide use),
C is a conglomerado dummy variable indexed
by c, c = {1, …, 1920}, i is a household in conglom-
erado c, Tt is a year fixed effect with t = {2014,
2015, 2016}, and WS is a plausibly exogenous
dummy variable for a weather shock that takes
the value of one when the conglomerado has
experienced a weather realization in the previ-
ous year substantially above or below that of
the historical reference period. The specific
shocks represented by WS change depending
on the model. Specifically, in table 4, WS
includes dummies for both high and low rainfall
shocks as well as the rainfall z-score. In table 5,
WS is expanded to also incorporate high and
low CV shocks. The primary coefficient of inter-
est is β, the coefficient on th variable(s) WS.
The variables in Xic represent a set of house-
hold characteristics that include farm size,16
16
The three rounds of surveys were designed to be identical, but
the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics did not collect
some data for 2014. Accordingly, we do not have households’ land
(plot) areas for this year. To overcome this missing data issue, we
predict landholdings for the 2014 round using household charac-
teristics. We use predicted values generated from a quantile
regression, which correctly predicts 92.5% of households in the
2015 and 2016 test samples (see online supplementary appendix
Figure S2).
910 May 2021
family size, livestock ownership, land tenure,
distance to the center/market, cooperative
membership, and access to financial services.
uict is a household-specific, idiosyncratic error
term allowed to be arbitrarily correlated
within conglomerados. Robust standard errors
throughout our analysis are clustered at the
conglomerado level.
A second model of interest examines
whether the frequency of recent shocks
impacts farmer behavior. As discussed above,
the motivation for this specification is that
more frequent shocks might alter farmers’
expectations regarding current or future
weather differently than singular shocks. To
explore this hypothesis, we estimate a model
in which the primary explanatory variable
counts how many shocks of a certain type have
occurred in a locality in recent years.
Specifically:
X
n smaller—with a mean cultivated area of 2.9
Ypict = α + β1 WSc, t − k + β2 WScr, t − k + δXic
k=1
+ Tt + Cc + uict
ð2Þ
where Y denotes the value for one of the four
outcomes of interest p (water conservation
index, soil conservation index, fertilizer use,
and pesticide use), WSr is a dummy variable
that reflects the cumulative number of shock
years, n {3, 5, 10}, and p indexes the four pri-
mary outcomes. The coefficients of interest in
this specification are those on the WSr, which
provide the marginal impact of an additional
year of a particular shock in the preceding
three-, five-, or ten-year interval. We con-
struct the frequency of shocks in this way to
capture the intuition that, for example,
receiving two years of shocks in three years
is substantially different than receiving two
over a ten-year period. Here the coefficients
of interest are β2.
Results
We first provide descriptive statistics for the
sample and for past weather realizations
households have faced. We then present esti-
mates of farmer responsiveness to different
weather realizations before turning to the pre-
sentation of treatment heterogeneity and
robustness checks.
Amer. J. Agr. Econ.
Summary Statistics
Descriptive statistics for sample households
are presented in table 1. Observable charac-
teristics of Andean households are nearly
identical between the three survey years. Con-
firming known trends, the average size of
Peruvian rural families is decreasing, while
farmers are getting older, as seen from the
trends in household heads’ age and experience
as well as a high baseline mean value of
52 years of age. Interestingly, the biggest dif-
ference between the samples from the three
years is possession of a savings account: 4.9%
of households had a savings account in the
2014 sample and 24.4% in the 2016 sample.17
Roughly 63% of farmers grow maize, similarly
63% grow potato, and 26% of the sample grow
both crops. Note that farmers of the highlands
do differ from the national sample in a few
ways. Specifically, farm sizes are much
hectares in the highlands compared to 4.9
hectares nationwide—the rate of credit access
is poorer (9% vs 12%), share of Indigenous
population is higher (62% vs 51%), and
Andean farmers grow more staple crops for
subsistence. They also report selling a smaller
portion of their crop and receiving signifi-
cantly smaller revenues than potato and maize
farmers in the national sample: mean value of
crop sales is roughly 4,400 Peruvian soles
(1,400 USD) nationally, whereas for the high-
lands’ sample it is 2,250 Peruvian soles (709
USD).18
The average values of the outcome vari-
ables are reported in table 2. Among the four
soil conservation practices, mixing soil with
organic matter is the most common, with an
average use application rate of 73%, followed
by crop rotations, used by 71% of farmers over
years. Roughly 12% of farmers construct ter-
races and—as mentioned above—less than
2% conduct soil analysis. Application of water
conservation practices range from around 4%
adoption rate (measurement of irrigation) to
38% (irrigation maintenance), with consider-
able fluctuation in adoption rates over years.
Across the years, between 51% and 54% of
farmers use synthetic fertilizer, and 47% to
54% apply chemical pesticides.
Table 3 summarizes the occurrences of cli-
mate shocks over preceding season for each
17
The difference is statistically significant at 1% level.
18
These conversions from Peruvian nuevo soles to US dollars
use 2015 exchange rates.
Tambet and Stopnitzky Climate and Conservation Agriculture in Peru 911

Table 2. Summary Statistics of Farming Practices

2014 2015 2016

Soil practices composite index 0.20 (0.57) 0.16 (0.51) 0.21 (0.49)
Water practices composite index 0.33 (0.63) 0.29 (0.58) 0.26 (0.57)
Application of fertilizer 0.51 (0.50) 0.53 (0.50) 0.54 (0.50)
Application of pesticides/herbicides 0.47 (0.50) 0.48 (0.50) 0.54 (0.50)
Soil analysis 0.02 (0.12) 0.01 (0.11) 0.01 (0.11)
Organic matter 0.72 (0.45) 0.69 (0.46) 0.78 (0.42)
Crop rotation 0.69 (0.46) 0.70 (0.46) 0.74 (0.44)
Terraces 0.14 (0.34) 0.11 (0.31) 0.10 (0.31)
Determine crop water needs 0.33 (0.47) 0.11 (0.31) 0.14 (0.34)
Determine irrigation times 0.28 (0.45) 0.17 (0.38) 0.18 (0.38)
Irrigation measurement 0.04 (0.19) 0.03 (0.18) 0.05 (0.21)
Irrigation maintenance 0.37 (0.48) 0.36 (0.48) 0.42 (0.49)
Observations 10,115 11,076 11,588
Note: Unweighted sample averages reported with standard errors in parentheses. Figures indicate the proportion of farmers in the sample who reported
practicing the specified CSA activities.

year. In general, high total rainfall shocks are
substantially more common than negative
shocks (i.e. droughts) in the Peruvian high-
lands during this time period. Between 2014
and 2016, 24% to 32% of conglomerados
experience abnormally high rainfall during
previous year, and 6% to 15% of conglomera-
dos experience a drought. With respect to
rainfall volatility, between 1% and 13% of
conglomerados experience substantially more
volatility than the long-term norm in our sam-
ple, and 18%–27% of conglomerados experi-
ence unusually low variation in intra-annual
rainfall patterns.
Level Shocks
Our main analysis connects plausibly exoge-
nous variation in weather with adoption rates
of practices. We first look at the effect of real-
ized weather shocks on adoption in isolation.
To study the basic effects of abnormal rainfall,
we categorize conglomerado-level differences
in adoption rates by the shock that localities
received over the previous agricultural year.
Figure 1 shows raw mean differences in prac-
tice adoption rates by shock “categories,” that
is, by whether their previous year is classified
as no shock, as a year of abnormally high, or
abnormally low rainfall. The figure suggests
the adoption rate of water practices is sensitive
to excessive rainfall, while drought year
appears to result in higher rate of herbicide
application.
Table 4 presents the results from regres-
sions of aggregate conglomerado-level adop-
tion rates of all four outcomes on rainfall
shocks over period t − 1, current season’s
rainfall and temperature, time and location
dummies, and household characteristics.19 A
year of high rainfall results in fewer farmers
employing water conservation practices dur-
ing the following year—with the reduction of
0.07 standard deviations being significant at
0.01 level—as well as soil conservation prac-
tices, with a smaller drop of 0.04 standard devi-
ations. The proportion of farmers applying
pesticides goes up by 7–8 percentage points after
a year of drought, whereas preceding year’s
abnormal rainfall, either low or high, has no dis-
cernible effect on share of fertilizer users.
Volatility Shocks
In this section we incorporate rainfall volatility
shocks into our base model. The treatment
effects of interest here are abnormally high
or low variability of rainfall, controlling for
rainfall levels. These results are presented in
table 5. The previously observed main effects
of level shocks are largely robust to adding
rainfall variation. First, the significant and
large impact of drought on increase in pesti-
cide use remains, while the share of farmers
applying pesticide drops if previous year’s
low levels of precipitation coincide with highly
variable rain (column 8). The latter suggests
that the costly, risky decision of acquiring
chemical inputs under unknown, possibly
adverse conditions might be driving the appli-
cation rates. At the same time, application of
synthetic fertilizer shows a marginally signifi-
cant increase of five percentage points after a
19
All models include analytical weights are added to adjust for
the number of observations in clusters (conglomerados).
912 May 2021
Table 3. Conglomerado-Level Rainfall Shocks in the Preceding Year
High rainfall shock (t − 1)
Low rainfall shock (t − 1)
High variation shock (t − 1)
Low variation shock (t − 1)
High CV x high rainfall (t − 1)
High CV x low rainfall (t − 1)
Observations
Notes: Unweighted sample averages reported with standard errors in parentheses. Figures indicate the proportion of conglomerados that experienced a
respective shock (measured as 1/0 indicator variable) over the twelve months preceding the respective agricultural year (i.e., over period t-1) in the highlands
region of Peru. A “high rainfall shock” is an average over the preceding twelve months that is more than one SD above the thirty-year average. A “low rainfall
shock” is defined analogously. A “high variation shock” is one where the coefficient of variation of monthly rainfall in the preceding year is more than one SD
higher than the thirty-year coefficient of variation. “Low variation shock” is again defined analogously.
drought year (columns 5 and 6), suggesting
that low rainfall makes farmers seek addi-
tional nutrient boosts.
The results in table 5 suggest that low rain-
fall does not lead farmers to adopt soil conser-
vation practices—nor does high variation of
precipitation (see columns 1 and 2). We do
find evidence, however, of reduced soil con-
servation following high levels of rain, a
decrease of 0.04 standard deviations signifi-
cant at the 5% level.
These results contrast with water conserva-
tion practices, which do appear responsive to
both levels of rainfall as well as low volatility.
Efforts to conserve water appear to be signifi-
cantly reduced after unusually low volatility of
precipitation, an effect similar in magnitude to
the decrease after excessive rain. Although we
do not see an impact of the high variability shock
on its own, high volatility in combination with a
low rainfall shock—arguably the worst kind of
combination for a farmer—increases water con-
servation practices by 0.21 standard deviations.
The application of water conservation measures
thus appears to be sensitive to past year’s
weather realizations, and farmers tend to adjust
their production behavior, especially in response
to abnormally high variation in rain.
Frequency of Weather Shocks
This section now studies whether repetitive
shocks in the recent past trigger different
behavior than just a single year event by esti-
mating a model that includes the number of
shocks experienced over different time periods
in the medium-term past, that is, over the past
three-, five- and ten-year time horizons.
The results from these regressions are
shown in table 6. The first noteworthy result
is that evidence of behavioral responses to
Amer. J. Agr. Econ.
2014 2015 2016
0.24 (0.43) 0.32 (0.47) 0.25 (0.43)
0.15 (0.36) 0.06 (0.24) 0.10 (0.30)
0.00 (0.07) 0.07 (0.26) 0.13 (0.34)
0.27 (0.44) 0.23 (0.42) 0.18 (0.38)
0.00 (0.07) 0.01 (0.09) 0.03 (0.16)
0.00 (0.00) 0.00 (0.00) 0.05 (0.22)
892 1,173 1,176
the prior year’s shocks, presented above, is
robust to controlling for additional previous
shocks: farmers decrease soil and water con-
servation after excessive levels of rainfall.
Application of pesticides, on the other hand,
increases after a year of drought and declines
after abnormally low variation in rain.
Together, these results suggest the most recent
past continues to exert an important influence
over a given year’s farming behavior.
Second, water practices appear insensitive
to experiencing several years of shocks (see
columns 4–6 of table 6), whereas soil conserva-
tion is actually taken up by farmers after a
locality receives multiple years of abnormally
high or low rainfall (columns 1–3). In particu-
lar, the rate of soil conservation practices
increases by 0.07 standard deviations for every
additional high rainfall shock received over
the previous three years and by 0.06 standard
deviations for every additional drought year
experienced over previous five years. This
result is robust to the inclusion of our variables
for volatility and interactions of these with
level shocks. A number of explanations for
the non-intuitive result could exist, including
psychological explanations of how high versus
low shocks are remembered or discussed
among farmers, as well more subtle explana-
tions surrounding when precisely these shocks
occurred during the growing season and how
yields were impacted. This is an area where
future research is warranted.
Finally, we find evidence that fertilizer
application increases as the number of low
rainfall years increases over three- and ten-
year period, as seen in columns 7–9 of table 6.
Both results are, again, robust to including
rainfall variation shocks and household-level
covariates. By contrast, pesticide use, which
increases by approximately five percentage
points following a single year of low rainfall,
Tambet and Stopnitzky Climate and Conservation Agriculture in Peru 913

Figure 1. Change in adoption over previous year as a function of prior rainfall

does not appear to have any differential adop-
tion as the number of recent shocks increases.
Additional Analyses and Robustness Checks
Finally, we examine how individual and house-
hold characteristics affect the heterogeneity of
farmer responses to shocks (Fafchamps 1992;
Rosenzweig and Binswanger 1992). Here we
incorporate heterogeneous effects by including
interaction term(s) between two variables of
interest and the vector of climate variables.
The first characteristic we explore is a crucial
determinant of both adaptation and adoption
in other settings, the size of land holdings, as
households with more land are known to have

Table 4. Rainfall Shocks and Farmers’ Conservation Practices

Soil practices Water practices Fertilizer use Pesticide use
(1) (2) (3) (4)
High rainfall shock (t-1) −0.04** (0.02) −0.07*** (0.03) 0.01 (0.01) 0.01 (0.01)
Low rainfall shock (t-1) 0.00 (0.03) −0.08* (0.04) 0.03 (0.03) 0.08*** (0.02)
Rainfall z-score −0.00 (0.02) 0.01 (0.02) 0.01 (0.01) 0.00 (0.01)
Grow season temperature −0.25*** (0.09) −0.10 (0.11) −0.24*** (0.06) −0.18*** (0.06)
Constant 2.99*** (1.07) 1.40 (1.30) 3.18*** (0.66) 2.36*** (0.68)
Adj. R2 0.292 0.365 0.462 0.403
N 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768
Notes: The primary coefficients of interest are the high and low rainfall shock variables. Both rainfall level shock and rainfall variation shock are interpreted as z-
scores, that is, standard deviations from the thirty-year average level or coefficient of variation of rainfall, respectively. CV is calculated as the annual standard
deviation divided by annual mean precipitation. Robust standard errors clustered at the conglomerado level are reported in parentheses. Our estimates of
interest remain unchanged with or without the control variables included here.
*
p < 0.10.
**
p < 0.05.
***
p < 0.01.
 914
May 2021

Table 5. Levels and Volatility of Rainfall and Farmer Conservation Practices

Soil practices Water practices Fertilizer use Pesticide use
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)
High rainfall shock (t − 1) −0.05** −0.04** −0.09*** −0.10*** 0.01 (0.01) 0.01 (0.01) 0.02 (0.01) 0.02 (0.02)
(0.02) (0.02) (0.03) (0.03)
Low rainfall shock (t − 1) −0.02 (0.04) −0.00 (0.04) −0.05 (0.05) −0.10* (0.05) 0.05* (0.03) 0.05* (0.03) 0.05* (0.03) 0.08** (0.03)
High CV shock (t − 1) −0.01 (0.03) 0.01 (0.03) −0.04 (0.04) −0.09 (0.06) 0.03 (0.02) 0.05 (0.03) −0.05** −0.01 (0.03)
(0.02)
Low CV shock (t − 1) 0.03 (0.02) 0.03 (0.02) −0.09*** −0.09*** −0.01 (0.01) −0.01 (0.01) 0.02 (0.01) 0.02 (0.01)
(0.02) (0.02)
High CV × high rainfall −0.05 (0.09) −0.06 (0.11) −0.05 (0.06) −0.03 (0.07)
(t − 1)
High CV × low rainfall −0.06 (0.05) 0.21** (0.09) −0.01 (0.04) −0.12**
(t − 1) (0.05)
Rainfall z-score −0.00 (0.02) −0.00 (0.02) −0.01 (0.02) −0.02 (0.02) 0.01 (0.01) 0.01 (0.01) 0.01 (0.01) 0.02 (0.01)
CV z-score 0.02* (0.01) 0.02* (0.01) 0.03** (0.02) 0.03* (0.02) −0.01 (0.01) −0.01 (0.01) −0.00 (0.01) −0.00 (0.01)
Constant 3.83*** 3.82*** 0.85 (1.30) 0.67 (1.30) 2.90*** 2.86*** 2.59*** 2.64***
(1.07) (1.07) (0.71) (0.71) (0.72) (0.72)
Controls No Yes No Yes No Yes No Yes
Adj. R2 0.293 0.293 0.368 0.369 0.463 0.463 0.403 0.403
N 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768
Notes: Robust standard errors clustered at the conglomerado level are reported in parentheses. All models control for age, sex, education, and experience of household head, household size, livestock ownership, land ownership, irrigation,
membership in a cooperative, savings account, credit access, whether Indigenous, exposure to extension services, and distance to the center. CV is calculated as the annual standard deviation divided by annual mean precipitation. Both rainfall level
shock and rainfall variation shock are interpreted as z-scores, that is, standard deviations from the thirty-year average level or coefficient of variation of rainfall, respectively.
*
p < 0.10.
**
p < 0.05.
***
p < 0.01.
Amer. J. Agr. Econ.
Tambet and Stopnitzky
higher capacity to mitigate production risks
through their capital endowments (Feder, Just,
and Zilberman 1985; Zilberman, Zhao, and
Heiman 2012).
The second characteristic we study, which
could result in heterogeneous adaptation, is
the age of a household head. We hypothesize
that younger farmers could be more respon-
sive to climatic changes as well as uptake of
beneficial practices. For the empirical estima-
tion, we construct variables indicating a house-
hold being (a) below median landholding
size,20 and (b) below median age of
household head.
We find little evidence that farms of below
median size responding to rainfall level shocks
differently than larger farms (see online sup-
plementary appendix table S6). The excep-
tions here are below median size farms
decreasing use of water practices following a
high variance shock and increasing use of
these practices following a low variance shock,
relative to above median farms.
Farmer age is another characteristic of pol-
icy relevance, in particular in the Peruvian
context as the farming population ages over
time; if practices with CSA potential are dis-
proportionately adopted by younger farmers,
it would suggest targeted policy responses to
further adoption. However, we do not find evi-
dence that age mediates the responsiveness of
farmers to different weather shocks, with the
exception of younger farmers being slightly
more likely to reduce both soil and conserva-
tion following a year of excessive rainfall as
compared to older farmers (see online supple-
mentary appendix table S7).
Robustness checks. In support of our empirical
strategy, we extend our empirical framework
in a few ways. Our first and most important
robustness check examines farmer behavior
in a pseudo-panel framework based on data
collapsed to the conglomerado level; the
results from these models are presented in
table 7. This approach mitigates concern about
time-invariant unobservables at the conglom-
erado level or omitted variable bias possibly
correlated with our weather variables. The
20
The respective medians are 1.04 hectares in 2014, 1.06 hect-
ares in 2015, and 1.07 hectares in 2016. Because the 2014 survey
did not collect data on land acreage, we predict sizes of agricultural
land area for 2014 using a quantile regression with household char-
acteristics from the 2015 and 2016 samples. This method correctly
predicts 92.8% of the plot sizes for the latter two rounds of data;
we present graphical evidence of the predictive power of this
approach in online supplementary appendix Figure S2.
Climate and Conservation Agriculture in Peru 915
estimates that emerge from these models are
extremely similar to the repeated cross-section
approach used in the rest of the article. In par-
ticular, there are no statistically significant dif-
ferences between estimates on the two
modeling approaches for any of the important
explanatory variables nor for any of the four
major outcomes. This consistency across
modeling approaches with different underly-
ing identification assumptions lends credibility
to our main findings.
Second, we conduct two placebo tests. The
first uses “leads” of shocks; that is, we regress
our outcome measures in year t on weather
shocks that occur in year t + 1, which should
not affect outcomes that preceded them.
Accordingly, we find no statistically significant
effect of these spurious “lead” shocks on
farmer behavior. Similarly, we also test
whether these weather shocks spuriously
affect other household-level variables that
should not plausibly be affected by the
weather, such as educational attainment—
following the logic that we do not expect the
demographic composition of conglomerados
to change after a single year of unusual
weather realization, at least for household
heads. Again, we find no evidence that
weather drives these other variables.21
Discussion
The empirical analysis in this article generates
three clear findings. First, water conservation
practices are highly responsive to the unusual
weather realizations of both types, with some
evidence that multiple shocks over longer time
periods also drive the adoption of improved
water practices. In particular, the share of
farmers using water conservation practices
drops after a year of (a) high rainfall or (b) lit-
tle variability of rainfall (both by about 0.09
standard deviations) while they increase as
farmers face multiple years of low rainfall over
a ten-year period. That these results only
appear over the recent past and over longer
time horizons rather than over three- and
five-year periods warrants further investiga-
tion regarding how farmers update their
beliefs about climate.
21
Tables with these robustness checks are available upon
request.
Table 6. Recurring Shocks and Farmer Responses
916

Soil practices Water practices Fertilizer use Pesticide use

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12)
May 2021

High rainfall −0.05** −0.04* −0.05*** −0.09*** −0.08*** −0.10*** 0.01 0.00 0.01 0.02 0.02 0.02
shock (t-1) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.03) (0.03) (0.03) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02)
Low rainfall shock −0.02 −0.04 −0.01 −0.07 −0.06 −0.05 0.04 0.04 0.04 0.05* 0.06** 0.05*
(t-1) (0.04) (0.04) (0.04) (0.05) (0.05) (0.05) (0.03) (0.03) (0.03) (0.03) (0.03) (0.03)
High CV shock (t- −0.02 −0.03 −0.04 −0.05 −0.05 −0.04 0.03 0.03 0.03 −0.05** −0.04* −0.06**
1) (0.03) (0.03) (0.03) (0.04) (0.04) (0.04) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02)
Low CV shock (t- 0.03 0.04* 0.04** −0.09*** −0.09*** −0.09*** −0.01 −0.01 −0.01 0.02 0.02 0.03*
1) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.01) (0.02)
Count of low 0.01 0.06** 0.02* 0.01
rainfall shocks (0.02) (0.02) (0.01) (0.01)
in 10 y.
Count of high 0.01 −0.00 0.01 −0.01
rainfall shocks (0.03) (0.04) (0.02) (0.02)
in 10 y.
Count of low 0.06** 0.03 0.02 −0.03
rainfall shocks (0.02) (0.03) (0.01) (0.02)
in 5 y.
Count of high −0.01 −0.04 0.01 −0.01
rainfall shocks (0.02) (0.03) (0.01) (0.02)
in 5 y.
Count of low 0.02 0.00 0.03* 0.01
rainfall shocks (0.03) (0.04) (0.02) (0.02)
in 3 y.
Count of high 0.07*** 0.03 0.00 0.02
rainfall shocks (0.02) (0.02) (0.01) (0.01)
in 3 y.
Constant 3.78*** 3.39*** 3.74*** 0.41 0.12 0.84 2.74*** 2.87*** 2.77*** 2.48*** 2.54*** 2.54***
(1.08) (1.11) (1.06) (1.31) (1.37) (1.30) (0.72) (0.74) (0.71) (0.73) (0.77) (0.72)
Adj. R2 0.293 0.294 0.295 0.368 0.368 0.368 0.463 0.463 0.463 0.403 0.403 0.403
N 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768 32,768
Notes: Robust standard errors clustered at the conglomerado level are reported in parentheses. All regressions include controls for age, sex, education, and experience of household head, household size, livestock ownership, land ownership,
irrigation, membership in a cooperative, savings account, credit access, whether Indigenous, exposure to extension services, and distance to the center. CV is calculated as the annual standard deviation divided by annual mean precipitation. Both
rainfall level shock and rainfall variation shock are interpreted as z-scores, that is, standard deviations from the thirty-year average level or coefficient of variation of rainfall, respectively.
*
p < 0.10.
**
p < 0.05.
***
p < 0.01.
Amer. J. Agr. Econ.
Tambet and Stopnitzky
Second, while soil conservation drops
slightly after excessive rainfall last season,
farmers tend to adopt soil conservation
measures after they experience multiple
years of either unusually high or low levels
of rain. We find that the proportion of
farmers using soil conservation practices
increases by 0.06 standard deviations for
every extra drought year over past five
years, and 0.07 for every extra year of
excessive rain over past three years.
Farmers’ soil practices are thus sensitive to
shocks of various types, a finding that aligns
with the (sparse) literature of adaptation
studies that incorporate rainfall data. For
example, Asfaw et al. (2014) find that
greater rainfall variability is positively asso-
ciated with the choice of risk-reducing prac-
tices such as soil and water conservation,
whereas Arslan, Belotti, and Lipper
et al. (2017) show that Tanzanian farmers
mitigate the risk of rainfall variability by
using soil and water conservation measures.
Further, as an extension to our main anal-
ysis (reported in the online supplementary
appendix), we explore the ways individual
soil practices drive our findings for the com-
bined summary index. The evidence sug-
gests that while the drop after excessive
rain during the prior year is driven by a lower
rate of organic matter application—a prac-
tice specifically useful in drought-prone
conditions—and to a lesser extent by
reduced terrace construction, multiple years
of excessive rainfall results in more of each
of crop rotations, construction of terraces,
and application of organic matter. Multiple
years of drought, on the other hand, bring
about more soil conservation primarily
through two of the practices—organic mat-
ter amendment and crop rotations.
Third, farmers respond to negative
rainfall-level shocks (i.e., drought condi-
tions) by increasing application of pesticides.
We estimate this treatment effect to be a 7.1
to 7.8 percentage point increase in the pro-
portion of farmers using pesticides
(i.e. about a 14% increase in this practice).
These findings align with prior studies show-
ing the prohibitive effect of uncertain envi-
ronments on purchases of costly inputs. On
the other hand, we do not find evidence that
multiple, repeated years of shock would
push more farmers to increase usage of
either of the inorganic inputs—with the
exception of potential small increase in pes-
ticide/herbicide use after drought years.
Climate and Conservation Agriculture in Peru 917
These findings raise interesting questions
about when farmers are incorporating infor-
mation about the recent weather into their
beliefs and practices. Many of the conserva-
tion practices we investigated are relatively
easy and cheap to implement. One might
expect that such cheap efforts are less likely
to be affected by the fact subsistence farmers
tend to be risk averse (although uncertainty
over the benefits of adoption might still affect
decision making). Holding expected yields
constant, however, we would expect risk-aver-
sion’s effect on adoption would decline with
the cost of adoption for a given technology.
The extent to which this happens depends on
both expected costs and benefits, as argued
before, but in practice could exhibit rather
nuanced influences on farmers’ choices. For
example, water-related practices include
whether one waters their plants at the requi-
site frequency as well as whether one mea-
sures the amount of water used. These are
behaviors that can be relatively easily adopted
(or perhaps easily learned and then implemen-
ted). Other agricultural practices require more
time and/or money to implement, such as con-
ducting maintenance on an irrigation system
or constructing terraces. To the extent that
costly investments might be impacted by the
previous year’s bad shock, low profits last year
could negatively affect what a farmer is able to
accomplish this year.22 Given our data and
empirical strategy, it is difficult to disentangle
precisely what is an ex ante adaptive response
to an expected future world and what is a
behavior adopted ex post to avoid or somehow
mitigate what a farmer recently experienced.
The medium- and long-run dynamics of
farmers’ expectation formation and behavior
change remain outside of the scope of the rel-
atively short time horizon of this study, yet
these are important questions from theoretical
and policy standpoints.
Conclusion
In understanding the economic impacts of cli-
mate change, adaptation is both crucial and
poorly understood (Zilberman, Zhao, and
Heiman 2012; Di Falco and Veronesi 2013).
22
Note that our data preclude our ability to follow specific
farmers over time, so we can only analyze conglomerado-level
averages over time.
 918
May 2021

Table 7. Repeated Cross-Section Versus Panel Estimates of Main Effects

Soil Index Water Index Fertilizer use Pesticide use
Individual Cluster Individual Cluster Individual Cluster Individual Cluster
High rainfall shock (t-1) −0.05** −0.04* (0.02) −0.10*** −0.09*** 0.01 (0.01) −0.00 (0.01) 0.02 (0.02) 0.01 (0.02)
(0.02) (0.03) (0.03)
Low rainfall shock (t-1) −0.00 (0.04) 0.01 (0.04) −0.10* (0.05) −0.11** 0.06* (0.03) 0.03 (0.03) 0.08** (0.03) 0.06* (0.03)
(0.05)
High CV shock (t-1) 0.01 (0.03) 0.01 (0.03) −0.09 (0.06) −0.10* (0.06) 0.04 (0.03) 0.02 (0.03) −0.02 (0.04) −0.04 (0.03)
Low CV shock (t-1) 0.02 (0.02) 0.01 (0.02) −0.10*** −0.12*** −0.02* (0.01) −0.02 (0.01) 0.01 (0.02) 0.01 (0.02)
(0.02) (0.02)
High CV × high rainfall −0.05 (0.09) −0.09 (0.09) −0.06 (0.11) −0.06 (0.10) −0.04 (0.06) 0.02 (0.06) −0.01 (0.07) 0.03 (0.06)
(t-1)
High CV × low rainfall (t- −0.06 (0.05) −0.06 (0.05) 0.21** (0.09) 0.26*** (0.08) −0.03 (0.04) −0.00 (0.05) −0.13** −0.08*
1) (0.05) (0.05)
Rainfall z-score −0.00 (0.02) 0.00 (0.02) −0.02 (0.02) −0.00 (0.02) 0.01 (0.01) 0.01 (0.01) 0.02* (0.01) 0.02* (0.01)
CV z-score 0.02** (0.01) 0.02** (0.01) 0.03* (0.02) 0.04** (0.01) −0.01 (0.01) −0.00 (0.01) −0.00 (0.01) −0.00 (0.01)
Grow season temperature −0.34*** −0.33*** −0.04 (0.11) −0.09 (0.10) −0.21*** −0.20*** −0.22*** −0.14**
(0.09) (0.08) (0.06) (0.06) (0.06) (0.07)
Constant 4.20*** (1.08) 4.20*** (1.00) 0.84 (1.30) 1.41 (1.22) 3.05*** (0.72) 2.89*** (0.78) 3.12*** (0.75) 2.23***
(0.80)
Adj. R2 0.278 0.338 0.359 0.330 0.426 0.663 0.311 0.494
N 32,768 3,208 32,768 3,208 32,768 3,208 32,768 3,208
Notes: The columns labeled “individual” are estimates produced by model specifications using repeated cross-sectional data on household plots with location and year fixed effects. Columns labeled “cluster” are panel estimates where all individual
data were collapsed to the conglomerado-level and weights are based on cluster size. Robust standard errors clustered at the conglomerado level are reported in parentheses. All regressions include controls for age, sex, education, and experience of
household head, household size, livestock ownership, land ownership, irrigation, membership in a cooperative, savings account, credit access, whether Indigenous, exposure to extension services, and distance to the center. CV is calculated as the
annual standard deviation divided by annual mean precipitation. Both rainfall level shock and rainfall variation shock are interpreted as z-scores, i.e. standard deviations from the thirty-year average level or coefficient of variation of rainfall,
respectively.
*
p < 0.10.
**
p < 0.05.
***
p < 0.01.
Amer. J. Agr. Econ.
Tambet and Stopnitzky
To design policies and programs that help
farmers adapt to a changing climate and the
weather conditions it brings, it is critical to
understand the adaptive choices people make
when faced with shocks (Rosenstock
et al. 2016). Motivated by this question and
the scarcity of adaptation studies from South
America, this article helps us better under-
stand farm-level adaptations to changing
weather realizations in a country likely to
experience massive impacts from climate
change in the coming decades.
To this end, we examined the adoption of
conservation measures toward soil and water,
as well as the use of a chemical inputs. We pre-
sented evidence that weather shocks cause
potato and maize farmers in the Andean high-
lands, where the majority of Peruvian subsis-
tence farmers live, to spontaneously change a
number of their climate-smart agricultural
practices, which suggests that changes in the
climate over recent history has already
impacted the livelihoods and behaviors of
smallholders in Peruvian highlands. For exam-
ple, although much of our analysis focuses on
endogenous responses in broad areas of agri-
cultural production (e.g. soil and water prac-
tices), the evidence we present also suggests
that specific soil practices beneficial for
adverse water conditions—organic matter
application, crop rotations, and terrace
construction—are all responsive to multiple
years of weather shocks; these are empirical
results toward which policy design and imple-
mentation could be specifically targeted. In
particular, local and national adaptation plans
can prioritize place-specific benefits and facili-
tate faster take-up of such practices through
extension services, farmer training, group
and field schools, and incentives—especially
for terraces, a practice with the highest upfront
investment (Rioux et al. 2016).
An improved understanding of farmers’
responses to weather can thus can inform pol-
icy making that builds on their own autono-
mous adaptations and better assist the
agricultural transition into more uncertain cli-
matic times ahead.
Supplementary Material
Supplementary material are available at American
Journal of Agricultural Economics online.
Climate and Conservation Agriculture in Peru 919
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