Nutri‐Farming! Estimating the Impacts of a Nutritional Security Programme on Agricultural Productivity

ABSTRACT While global efforts towards enhancing nutrition security have been accelerating through agricultural interventions, surprisingly little is known about the causal impacts of such targeted programmes on crop yields. Using longitudinal data from the ICRISAT‐DLD, we study India's flagship ‘Nutri‐Farms Scheme’ and find that the programme led to an increase in wheat yields to the tune of 6.4%. Our identification strategy relies on plausibly exogenous variation generated by the institutional features of implementation of the programme. As potential mechanisms for these effects, we find evidence of increased investments in inputs and changes in production technology. Our results are robust to various checks for threats to identification including event‐study analysis, alternate control group, test of randomisation, allowing for linear time trends and controlling for various potential confounders. Back‐of‐the‐envelope calculations suggest that these unintended spillovers can potentially recover approximately 2% of the costs of the programme annually.