New Guidance for Measuring Other On-Farm Income

Measuring all components of smallholder farmer income is challenging due to survey fatigue, complex and intercropped farming systems, limited record-keeping, and the difficulty of capturing income managed by multiple household members.

Measuring what households earn on their farms beyond the focus crop of the study (e.g., cocoa, coffee, or another commodity) is additionally challenging given the varying needs for this data. A study designed to understand broad living income gaps in a hotspot analysis has very different requirements from one informing a diversification programme, where detailed knowledge of what farmers currently grow and earn is central to programme design. If you over collect data, you burden farming households with lengthy surveys that produce data of marginal value. But if you under collect, you risk systematically misrepresenting the living income gap or designing ineffective interventions.

To discuss this measurement challenge, the Living Income Community of Practice Technical Advisory Committee brought together practitioners, researchers, and measurement specialists in February 2026. The result is this new guidance document, Measuring other on-farm income: a practical guide to choosing the right approach, which distills the technical committee discussions into actionable frameworks. The guide covers five approaches to measuring non-focus crop income, from secondary data and self-reported estimates to detailed revenue and cost collection by income source. It also introduces an innovative asset-based approach developed by Dear Impact and ofi, which uses counts of plants and livestock combined with secondary yield and price data, a method particularly suited to complex, highly diversified and intercropped farming systems.

In summary, there is no single ‘correct’ method. The right approach depends on your use case and your capacity, and the guide offers a decision tree, a comparative summary table, and seven practical insights to help practitioners make informed, well-documented choices. Whether you are designing your first living income study or refining an existing methodology, this guide is meant to help you to match your measurement approach to your context.

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For more information, please contact us at livingincome(at)isealalliance.org.