Purpose: The authors examine the factors influencing membership in farmer organizations (FO) and their effects on the decision to adopt farm technologies by rice farmers in Ghana.Design/methodology/approach: This study uses a farm survey of 900 households from Northern Ghana and a recursive bivariate probit (RBP) model that accounts for selection bias and endogeneity.Findings: The results indicate that the household head’s decision to adopt machinery and row planting increases by 38.4 and 25.3%, respectively, upon joining a farmer organization. Membership in farmer organization is positively influenced by off-farm income, asset value, farmer organization location and farmer location in Upper West region but negatively by males, age and total livestock units owned. Machinery adoption is positively influenced by membership in farmer organizations and respondent being male but negatively influenced by the years of schooling, farm size, farm distance and location of a farmer in Ghana's Upper East and West regions. Similarly, row planting adoption is positively influenced by membership in farmers' organization but adversely by farm size, farm distance and a farmer's location in Upper East region of Ghana.Research limitations/implications: It can be concluded that membership in farmers' organizations significantly impacts farm household head’s decision to adopt machinery and row planting in rice production, which potentially enhance crop productivity.Practical implications: These results show the importance of agricultural stakeholders in encouraging the formation and strengthening of farmer organizations to support the adoption of modern farming technologies.Originality/value: Developing literature has demonstrated that farmer organizations promote the adoption of agricultural innovations. However, most of these studies have concentrated on conventional agricultural innovations and have used methods that fail to account for potential selection bias. This paper fills this important gap.

Agricultural intensification has been encouraged through the promotion of various agricultural technologies, but the synergies between different technologies have not been fully explored among various specific crops. Using the multinomial endogenous switching regression model complemented with the multivalued inverse probability regression model, this study determines the impacts of the adoption of combinations of chemical fertiliser, improved rice seeds, and herbicides on household welfare. Data were collected from 900 farm households in Northern Ghana. Our results indicate that the adoption of combinations of agricultural technologies is affected by various socio-economic attributes, resource constraints, institutional factors, and production shocks. We find that adopting multiple technologies improves rice yields, gross rice income, and per capita consumption expenditure. The results point out the crucial synergistic effects of the adoption of agricultural technologies on household welfare. We suggest that policies aimed at strengthening farm household welfare should encourage adopting multiple agricultural technologies in rice-producing farm households to realise the most welfare.

We examine the impact of farmer organization (FO) membership on food and nutrition security among rural rice farmers, using cross‐sectional data from a household survey from Ghana. We employ an endogenous switching regression (ESR) model to account for selection bias from observed and unobserved factors. Our findings show that participation in FOs significantly increases household dietary diversity by 10.56% and reduces food insecurity by 9.7%. The residualized quantile regression model results are consistent with the ESR model across both outcome variables. Policymakers should consider promoting FO membership as a strategy to enhance food and nutrition security among smallholders in developing countries.