# **4.3. Fieldwork**

In each round, there were three visits to each household, namely post-planting, crop-cutting, and post-harvest. During the post-planting visit, each household was administered a farm survey that collected information on (1) age, sex, education, economic activities, ethnicity, religion, and extension service receipts for all household members; (2) household dwelling and ownership of consumer durables and farm assets; (3) area, tenure, and individual-disaggregated ownership and rights for all parcels that were owned and/or cultivated by households during the reference rainy season; and (4) information on area, cultivation pattern, management and decision-making, conservation agricultural activities, farmer-assessed soil attributes and quality, pre-harvest labor and seed inputs for all maize plots that were cultivated during the reference rainy season.<sup>11</sup> The plot-level information was intended to be solicited from the corresponding plot manager. Specific to our analysis sample, the rate at which the plot-level information was solicited from the intended plot manager stands at 83 percent in both MAPS I and MAPS II. Following the completion of the household post-planting interview, the enumerator visited the randomly selected maize plot, measured its area and saved its boundaries on a Garmin eTrex 30 handheld GPS device, and set up crop cut sub-plots, in accordance with the international best practices, for later harvesting and weighing. A local crop monitor was recruited in each EA to ensure that the designated crop cut sub-plots were not harvested by the households until the subsequent visit. Specific to MAPS I, top and sub-soil samples were also obtained by the enumerators during the post-planting period, for objective soil fertility testing, as detailed below.

During the crop cutting visit, the enumerator harvested the crop cut sub-plots in order to obtain objectively measured harvest quantities. Two household members and the local crop cut monitor helped in the harvesting and shelling of the crop cut harvests that were weighed initially by the enumerator using an industrial digital scale. The samples were later transferred to a centralized facility for additional drying, moisture measurement, and final weighing. At crop cutting, the manager of the randomly selected maize plot also provided information on the morphological attributes of the maize plants on his/her plot with the help of a photo aid, as described below. In the final, post-harvest, visit, farmer-reported information on total plot-specific maize production, non-labor inputs and harvest labor inputs was solicited for all maize plots that were cultivated during the reference season. The post-harvest visit was scheduled within a 2-month period following the completion of each household’s harvest.

> 11 A parcel is conceptualized as a continuous piece of land under a common tenure system, while a plot is defined as a continuous piece of land on which a unique crop or a mixture of crops is grown, under a uniform, consistent crop management system, not split by a path of more than one meter in width, and with boundaries defined in accordance with the crops grown and the operator. Therefore, a parcel can be made up of one or more plots. This distinction is key since for the purposes of within-farm analysis of agricultural productivity, the ideal is to capture within-parcel, plot area measurements linked with plot-level measurement of agricultural production

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