Agricultural intensification through multiple-season farming: Effects on resiliency, food security and nutrition

Abstract

Agricultural intensification is key to improving food security, nutrition, and resilience. While most approaches focus on increasing productivity using improved inputs like fertilizers, an alternative, relatively understudied method involves multiple-season farming—cultivation across multiple periods in a year, enabled by conditions such as irrigation or alternative water access. Using panel data from the World Bank Living Standards Measurement Study (2010–2019) in Malawi, we examine how multiple-season farming shapes household food security, child nutrition, and resilience, defined as persistent food security over time. To mitigate selection bias, we employ fixed-effects and instrumental variable fixed-effects models. We find that multiple-season farming is statistically significantly associated with improved household food security (at the 1% level), particularly for asset-rich and male-headed households. Multiple season farmers cultivate more diverse crops and engage in market sales, which enhances their food supply. However, we find no significant impact on child nutrition. Using Cissé and Barrett’s (2018) moment-based method to estimate resilience, we provide suggestive evidence that multiple-season farming also positively affects household resilience. These results point to the potential of multiple-season farming to bolster food security and help farmers adapt to climate change. Our results also highlight the need for interventions that support poor and female-headed households to access the inputs needed for multiple season farming.