flexible compared to when it is inflexible (Column 5 of Table 10).

Farmers with autonomy also evinced a more open attitude towards change and experimentation.<sup>49</sup> In 2017, farmers in _T_ 3 are 0.27 _s_ . _d_ . more likely to exhibit a positive attitude towards change compared to farmers in _T_ 2. This last finding is interesting since it is consistent with the flexible grant leading to a willingness to experiment (perhaps by giving farmers a greater sense of agency). Such inferences, although speculative, do suggest fruitful areas for further research.

To summarize, farmers with the flexible grant in 2015 were more likely to exhibit increased knowledge of and trust in the program after it ended and display a more positive attitude towards experimentation. These changes could help explain why we see a greater persistence in program practices among this group two years after the program ended.

# **7 Conclusion**

Encouraging technology adoption in agriculture among smallholder farmers is an active area of research and a first-order policy issue. In this paper we test several hypotheses on the role of information in technology adoption that explicitly recognize the importance of heterogeneity in soil quality for best practices. We conduct detailed soil analyses and document substantial heterogeneity in soil quality, even within relatively small clusters, and correspondingly heterogeneous optimal recommendations for fertilizer usage. We show that farmers’ current fertilizer deviate from the localized ones both in mix as well as application practices markedly input timing (with a substantial overuse of urea and DAP).

We conducted a randomized experiment with a control and four treatment arms that provided a combination of localized soil analyses, recommendations and extension services, and an in-kind grant. We vary the level of recommendation specificity (plot level versus cluster level) and the degree of autonomy in the usage of the grant (flexible versus inflexible). The experimental design allows us to credibly test the effects of (a) pairing localized recommendations with extension services, (b) recommendation specificity, (c) an in-kind grant and (d) autonomy, with (a), (b) and (d) being, to the best of our knowledge, novel to the literature.

We document that varying the level of recommendation specificity had little effect on outcomes both in the short and longer-term so that there is no downside in choosing to provide cheaper recommendations based on cluster (localidad) level soil analyses relative to more expensive plot-level recommendations, even in a context with substantial heterogeneity. We find that pairing localized recommendations with extension services had modest but persistent ef-

> 49We measure this using a standardized index of five questions described in Appendix C (non-cognitive measures) of Laajaj and Macours (2017). Openness is measured by affirmative answers to agriculture specific issues (e.g. to statements such as “When you are presented with a new agricultural technology, you are willing to try it first”, “In your plots, you prefer to try something new”) as well as more general views about experimentation (e.g. “Generally speaking, you prefer to try new things”).

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