Abstract
Smallholder farmers in Ethiopia rely on family labour and lack the efficient skills necessary to produce crops. They frequently own less than one hectare of land and use animal draft power to cultivate the soil. Rainfall serves as the primary source of water for crops in agriculture. This study aims to investigate the impacts of crop diversification, agroforestry, and adjusted planting dates on the efficiency of farmers. A multinomial endogenous switching regression (MESR) model was used to analyse these factors. Multistage sampling is used to obtain cross-sectional data from 385 randomly selected households. The results revealed that adopting adjusted planting dates, crop diversification, and agroforestry significantly increased technical efficiency by 25%, 57%, and 54%, respectively. Adopting an adjusted planting date and agroforestry decreases the efficiency yield gap by 2.52 t/ha and 1.16 t/ha, respectively. Compared to nonadoption, adopting crop diversification, agroforestry, and adjusting planting dates results in a greater average technical efficiency score and a smaller average efficiency yield gap per hectare. CSA practices operate best in combination with high farmer efficiency, which is crucial for realizing their highest productivity potential. However, in scenarios where farmers do not possess the technical capability to be effective, the adoption of climate-smart agriculture (CSA) can be compromised. On this basis, we recommend to policymakers that they give top priority to measures that enhance farmers' technical efficiency as a primary cornerstone of CSA policy.