Workflows for Spatial Ex Ante Economic Analysis of Agronomy Interventions

Preface

This manual provides workflows for conducting spatial ex ante economic analysis of agronomic interventions. The statistical, mathematical and economic concepts in these workflows are already available in different books and journal articles. Our task was simply to organize these as standard operating procedures (SOPs) —i.e., analytical procedures that can be reproducible and replicated in other contexts. In this manual, you will how to conduct spatially explicit (mostly gridded) economic evaluation of agronomic innovations with R and other programming software including Octave/Matlab, and python.

Our purpose for these SOPs is to standardize the spatial exante economic analysis process so as to shorten the amount of time researchers spend on coding the common building blocks of spatial exante workflows.

The choice of which methods to showcase in the SOP reflects our taste and level of knowledge. It also reflects our goal which is to provide a prioritization assessment framework for potential agronomic investments.

We focus on three indicators for prioritization: yield gains, profit gains and robustness to risk.

This manual is and will always be free, open acces under the CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 License.

Acknowledgements: We thank Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia (CSISA) and Excellence in Agronomy (EiA) for funding this work. This version of the draft manual was written by Maxwell Mkondiwa with support from Jordan Chamberlin. It has not been reviewed thoroughly. All remaining errors are ours.