There is a specific moment in most agricultural technology projects that nobody plans for: the month after the external support ends.<\/p>\n\n
Up to that point, everything works. Attendance is good, the equipment functions, the reports are positive. Then the visits stop, and within a season a meaningful share of the adopters have quietly returned to what they did before.<\/p>\n\n
We tend to measure adoption as a binary event \u2014 the producer received the technology and used it. But every technology carries an ongoing cost that is invisible at handover: calibration, consumables, repair, the mental overhead of remembering a new step, and the social cost of doing something the neighbours are not doing.<\/p>\n\n
If that recurring cost exceeds the recurring benefit as the producer experiences it \u2014 not as the project calculates it \u2014 the technology gets dropped. Not from resistance. From arithmetic.<\/p>\n\n
Who repairs it in month fourteen?<\/strong> If the answer involves the project, the technology is on loan, not adopted.<\/p>\n\n What does the producer stop doing?<\/strong> New practices are almost always added to a workload that was already full. If nothing is removed, something will be.<\/p>\n\n Who else in the community can explain it?<\/strong> A practice that lives in one person’s head disappears when that person migrates, gets sick, or simply loses interest. Adoption becomes durable when it becomes local knowledge rather than individual knowledge.<\/p>\n\n It moves the design question from “is this technology good?” to “is this technology maintainable here?” \u2014 which frequently favours the simpler option. The most sophisticated tool I have seen abandoned was abandoned because it needed a part that took six weeks to arrive.<\/p>\n\n I would rather deploy something that captures seventy percent of the benefit and can be fixed with what is available locally. That is not a compromise on ambition. It is what ambition looks like when the timeframe is measured in years instead of project cycles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The question is rarely whether a technology works. It is whether it survives the month after the project vehicle stops arriving.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":93,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"va_seo_title":"","va_seo_description":"","va_reading_minutes":"2","va_original_id":"12","va_original_video":"","va_noindex":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,8,7],"class_list":["post-30","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-innovation","tag-extension","tag-smallholders","tag-technology-adoption"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorarboleda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorarboleda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorarboleda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorarboleda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorarboleda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorarboleda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64,"href":"https:\/\/victorarboleda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30\/revisions\/64"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorarboleda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorarboleda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorarboleda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorarboleda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What this changes about design<\/h2>\n\n