Illustration by Joe Waldron

Illustration by Joe Waldron

Back in 2010, HBS finance professor Shawn Cole embarked on a two-year randomized control trial with Nilesh Fernando, then a PhD candidate at Harvard, to evaluate whether a mobile phone–based advisory service might help farmers in India boost their yields. The findings were promising, Cole says: Those who received a weekly call about weather forecasts or pest strategies, for example, saw their yields increase by 8.6 percent for cotton and 28 percent for cumin. As a result, their estimated net income went up by about $100 a year—all for an intervention that amounted to less than $10 per person (but at no cost to the farmer). Even more encouraging to Cole was news that another colleague, Harvard economics professor Michael Kremer, had seen similar results in Kenya.

“We were so excited by this work,” Cole says, “that we persuaded a philanthropist to give us $1 million to start a nonprofit to design, evaluate, and scale this service.” In 2015, Cole and Kremer launched Precision Agriculture for Development, together with Dan Björkegren of Brown University and Heiner Baumann (MBA 1999), who serves as managing director. (The Lampert Byrd Foundation, cofounded by Mark Lampert [MBA 1988], provided the initial funding.) PAD’s mission is to connect the agricultural communication technology that was already in use in the developed world with smallholder farmers in developing countries. For the farmer growing cotton or cumin in India, for instance, it’s like having access to an agricultural extension agent at any time—at no cost.

Most often, any given question that a farmer submits to PAD (by text or voicemail) has been raised before, so a response is pushed back to the farmer’s phone. For the other 20 percent of cases, an agronomist researches the matter and sends a tailored reply within 24 hours. The more information a farmer shares with PAD—about planting practices, market prices, or soil conditions—the more its recommendations improve with time.

“The vision is to become a Netflix for agricultural extension, where we have lots of data about farmers’ soil type, crop preferences, willingness to take risk, and access to finance. Then we give them advice that’s directly related to their particular circumstances,” Cole says. Besides India, the Boston-based organization is serving 800,000 farmers through teams in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Ecuador, Kenya, Pakistan, and Rwanda, and aims to expand that reach to 100 million farmers.

According to Cole, the beauty of the work is threefold. First, it’s meeting a demand. “The majority of the world’s poorest people are involved in smallholder agriculture, and less than 10 percent of them get any agricultural advice from outside their neighbors or peers,” he says. Regional agricultural extension programs lack the necessary support, so one agent might represent an area with 10,000 farmers. Now, with ready access to data, farmers are adapting their practices, with results that boost an individual’s income as well as regional food security.

Second, PAD’s work responds to the long-standing challenge among social enterprises to measure impact—something Cole has seen firsthand in his research with the HBS Social Enterprise Initiative, particularly in the area of impact investing. Whereas most randomized control trials have long learning cycles of years or more, PAD’s interventions are delivered digitally, “so we know immediately who listens to what messages, and we can conduct surveys by phone in near real-time. It’s dramatically increasing the speed with which we can do research,” he says.

And finally, PAD’s iterative approach is based literally on the ground and out in the field, circumventing the dangers of so-called solutions that don’t meet the practical needs of the end user. “We’re doing a lot of A/B testing and evaluation, focusing on behavioral economics. It’s taking a lot of what we teach at HBS to a setting where it’s not often applied,” he says.

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