PONE-D-22-06649Farm Production Diversity, Household Dietary Diversity and Nutrition: Evidence from Uganda’s National Panel SurveyPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Sekabira,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by May 27 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Festo Massawe

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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[This research was financially supported by the 50x2030 Initiative through the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), under application no: 2104060035. We also gratefully acknowledge Heath Henderson for his constructive review and comments.]

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: I Don't Know

Reviewer #3: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Review of: Farm Production Diversity, Household Dietary Diversity and Nutrition: Evidence from Uganda’s National Panel Survey (Manuscript Number: PONE-D-22-06649)

This paper examines associations between the diversity of crop and livestock products produced by households living in Uganda and measures of the diversity of their food consumption. Although there are already many papers published on this topic, this is a welcome addition to the literature as it includes new evidence from a country that previously had received relatively little attention. That said, the paper would benefit from revisions along a number of lines.

(1) The discussion section needs to be more clear as to how the results presented in this paper fit into the literature. Specifically, I would strongly encourage the authors to place their paper within the debate found in a comparison of the review papers by Jones, A.D., 2017. (Critical review of the emerging research evidence on agricultural biodiversity, diet diversity, and nutritional status in low- and middle-income countries. Nutrition. Reviews. 75, 769–782) and Sibhatu, K. T., & Qaim, M. 2018. (Review: Meta-analysis of the association between production diversity, diets and nutrition in smallholder farm households. Food Policy, 77, 1–18.) Both papers provide empirical reviews on the links between production diversity and diversity of food consumption but reach different conclusions. Jones sees a “strong” link between production and consumption diversity; by contrast, Sibhatu and Qaim argue that “The average marginal effect of production diversity on dietary diversity is positive but small”.

My sense is that the paper’s findings are more consistent with the view put forward by Sibhatu and Qaim. Put differently, the authors do not give sufficient attention to the magnitudes of the associations that they observe in their data, both in terms of contextualizing their findings and also in their description of the policy implications. If indeed the magnitudes are small, then it is not obvious that so much attention should be paid to encouraging production diversification.

(2) It is not entirely clear if the sample includes both urban and rural households. This is not stated in the description of the survey, though a urban dummy variable appears in the reported regression results. My strong suggestion would be to focus solely on rural households. Urban households generally grown little food of their own and my guess is that those who do tend to be less well-off (which may explain the odd results the authors sometimes get on the crop diversity variable).

(3) Regional dummy variables appear in the regression results; it is not clear why they are being reported when the estimator is a household fixed effect specification (which should difference out time invariant characteristics such as location).

(4) The description of the survey suggests that data are collected twice per year. It is not clear how this is accounted for in the model specification.

(5) Does the measure of crop diversity include non-edible crops such as coffee and cotton? Given the focus of this paper, crop diversity should only include edible crops.

(6) Focusing on Table 2, how much does HDDS vary over time for any given household. Particularly with a fixed effect specification, I wonder if one of the reasons why the parameter estimates are so small is because for many households, there is no change in HDDS over time. A similar concern applies to the index variables for FPD, crops and animals.

(7) A strength of the paper is that it pays attention to the potentially confounding role of time invariant effects, specifically through the use of random effects, fixed effects and the Mundlak pseudo-fixed effects estimators. But strikingly, all three produce very similar parameter estimates. Given this, and given that the test statistics consistently report rejecting random effects in favor of a fixed effects specification, I suggest dropping the random effects results from the paper and retaining the results from the other two estimation methods. For Table 2, this change will create some space that can be used to present additional results. I suggest that the authors show the following:

Column 1: FE model with FPD bio index, no other controls

Column 2: MK model with FPD bio index, no other controls

Column 3: FE model with animal bio index & crop bio index, no other controls

Column 4: MK model with animal bio index & crop bio index, no other controls

Column 5: FE model with animal bio index & crop bio index, full set of controls

Column 6: MK model with animal bio index & crop bio index, full set of controls

This set of specifications will allow your readers to see that the results are not sensitive to either the use of FE or MK, or to the inclusion/exclusion of other control variables

(8) I suggest that the authors break Table 3 into four parts (one for each micro-nutrient). For each micro-nutrient, I suggest that they present four results:

Column 1: MK model. Total intake (=Own farm + market) with FPD bio index, full set of controls

Column 2: MK model. Total intake (=Own farm + market) with animal bio index & crop bio index, full set of controls

Column 3: MK model. Own farm intake with animal bio index & crop bio index, full set of controls

Column 4: MK model. Market intake with animal bio index & crop bio index, full set of controls

This reporting would be more informative than what currently exists in the paper. It would allow you to see the total effect of production diversity on micro-nutrient consumption (column 1); how much of this effect comes from animals and how much from crops (column 2); and whether own production is crowding out market intake (by comparing results from columns 3 and 4)

Reviewer #2: This is a relevant manuscript that highlights the importance of producing diverse food products. My comments for consideration are below:

• More information is needed in the introduction section describing the common food production and consumption patterns in Uganda. What various types of crops and livestock are usually produced? This is important because HDD score depends on food groups. Also, what proportion of farmers eat their own farm produce and what proportion do not. In other words, what proportion of own production is consumed? What types of farm products are usually sold for cash and not consumed by farmers?

• A few specific examples of crops considered in the counts would be useful since nutrient content and expected nutritional contributions may differ among crops. Such information will be helpful in the discussions on page 17.

• The authors found a strong positive association of the crop species count with energy and micronutrients sourced from own farm produce and attributed this to farmers mostly consuming what they grow. So, my question is: what is the problem in Uganda? If farmers are producing and eating what they grow, then what is the gap? Why are they hungry or suffering from malnutrition?

• In the last sentence on Page 18, what do you mean by essential foods? You listed cereals or their products, oils and fats etc. Why do you refer to these foods as essential? Also, you need to distinguish between raw produce and processed products. Aren't the farmers producing cereals and foods rich in fats and oils e.g. groundnuts? Clarify this essential food category.

• You concluded that diversification in crop species could be more important than animal species diversification towards availing more energy, and micronutrients per adult. Were you expecting significant differences in nutritional contrition of different livestock species? What different species were counted? Perhaps, livestock and fisheries could have some differences in nutritional value and contributions to HDDS. If there is data on fish production and consumption, then it will be interesting and relevant to consider it in the analysis.

• Other comments: the manuscript needs to be better structured with introduction, methods and data analysis sections clearly separated. Last paragraph on page 4 – 5 could be moved to methods section. Information under your current methods section could be put under data analysis.

Reviewer #3: The manuscript addresses an area of great importance to the success of policies, especially in resource-scarce settings. The manuscript is well-organised and easy to follow. I have read the manuscript and have made the following observations which I think the authors need to address before publication can be considered:

1. The manuscript requires significant proofreading, especially checking of punctuation.

2. Section I: Introduction

a) Please justify why the study only investigated the impact of FPD on daily energy, iron, zinc, and vitamin A, but not any other nutrients. Particularly, how do these relate to the nutritional issues in Uganda?

3. Section C: Data Description

a) It would be helpful for reader to give an overview of farm characteristics of the sample, e.g., location on map, names and types of crops cultivated, cropping system etc.

b) Referring to Table 1, the amount of energy and most micronutrients consumed from both market and own farm sources are far higher in year 2015 than in 2018 and 2019. Is there any explanation to this anomaly? Could this anomaly affect the statistical rigour?

4. Methods, Results and Discussions

a) It appears that the volume of crop yield and its potential confounding effect on HDDS and nutritional outcome have not been considered or discussed sufficiently in the manuscript.

b) “Each crop species added to those farmed with in a household was associated with 5.9 and 18.8 kilocalories (0.6 and 0.9 percentage points) added to energy sourced from own farm produce consumption or markets respectively. With regards to iron, each additional crop species was associated with 0.4 and 0.1 milligrams (4.2 and 0.7 percentage points) added to daily iron intake sourced from own farm produce or markets consumption respectively. With regards to zinc, each additional crop species grown on the farm was associated with 0.3 and 0.1 milligrams (6.2 and 0.9 percentage points) added to daily zinc intake sourced from own farm produce, and markets consumption respectively. Lastly, each additional crop species grown on farm was associated with 1.1 and 0.6 rae_micrograms (0.3 and 0.2 percentage points) added to daily vitamin A intake sourced from own farm produce, and markets consumption respectively.”

What is the significance of the percentages of gains quoted above in the diets of the sample population? Are these considered meaningful impact on nutritional status? Also, will increment in crop diversity continue to produce nutritional gains at a linear rate or will the effect level off? At what point will the effect level off?

c) “There are however other factors that are consistently and significantly associated with energy, and micronutrients intake, for instance gender effects, household size, and year variables, which we don’t discuss here to prioritize our focus on FPD sub-components, which are our main covariates.”

Wouldn’t understanding these other factors that are also consistently and significantly associated with energy, and micronutrients intake and the relationships of these factors with FPD help in devising more effective policy?

5. Section VI: Policy Implications

a) This section is not sufficiently discussed. It is suggested that the government should devote more attention to crop species, but it does not recommend any specific measures. The authors should focus on how to translate their research into practice at varying levels of scale, considering all other confounders and trade-offs.

b) For various apparent reasons, the policymakers might be more inclined to invest in promotion of cash crops as a means to achieve rural development and poverty alleviation. Cash crops also encourages mono-cropping that reduces FPD. How can this dilemma be addressed? How can policy makers be convinced?

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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PONE-D-22-06649R1Farm Production Diversity, Household Dietary Diversity and Nutrition: Evidence from Uganda’s National Panel SurveyPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Sekabira,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

 We have received comments from all 3 previous reviewers. Please note that Reviewer 3 has sent their comments in the document attached to this email. Please make sure you address all the concerns raised. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 18 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Carla Pegoraro

Division Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: I Don't Know

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Review of: Farm Production Diversity, Household Dietary Diversity and Nutrition: Evidence from Uganda’s National Panel Survey (Manuscript Number: PONE-D-22-06649R1)

This revised paper examines associations between the diversity of crop and livestock products produced by households living in Uganda and measures of the diversity of their food consumption. Although there are already many papers published on this topic, this is a welcome addition to the literature as it includes new evidence from a country that previously had received relatively little attention. The authors are to be commended for taking seriously the concerns raised in my initial report and for extensively revising the paper.

That said, this revision has generated new concerns that were not apparent in the initial submission.

(1) The specification used in Table 2 includes linear and quadratic terms for measures of production diversity. Tables 3-6 use linear terms only. This does not make sense; you need to use the same specification for all tables.

(2) The quadratic formulation in Table 2 produces some very odd results. I calculated the marginal effects of increasing diversity by one unit, using the estimates reported in column (1). Going from 0 to 1 and from 1-2 units increases consumption diversity, but going from 2 to 3, 3 to 4 and 4 to 5 leads to reductions in consumption diversity. This makes no sense. The authors have a good idea, they want to allow for diminishing increases in consumption diversity as production diversity rises but a quadratic formulation is the wrong way of doing so. A much better approach would be to use an inverse hyperbolic sine (see Bellemare, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics); this allows for increases at a diminishing rate while also allowing for zero values in the independent variable (note that you will need to convert the parameter estimates to marginal effects; Bellemare provides the formulae for doing so).

(3) The introductory materials are far too long; these could be reduced in length by 50%.

(4) The paper needs to be copy-edited by a native English speaker; there are still many odd use of words and phrases (for example, the abstract states that nutrition outcomes are disintegrated by source when I think the authors mean to say “disaggregated by source.”

(5) As this is an observational study, any policy implications should be made very cautiously.

Reviewer #2: The authors have done well by addressing all my concerns. I find the manuscript suitable for publication.

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: Yes: Ee Von Goh

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[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Review_v2.docx

PONE-D-22-06649R2Farm Production Diversity, Household Dietary Diversity and Nutrition: Evidence from Uganda’s National Panel SurveyPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Sekabira,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. There are still some minor issues to solve: the main regards the functional specification used in the estimates. As one of the reviewer indicated, you should include only the IHS transforms of crop and animal diversity without the linear term. Please, calculate also the marginal effects from parameter estimates following the formulas provided by Bellemare  (Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics).

Please submit your revised manuscript by Dec 10 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Francesco Caracciolo

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Review of: Farm Production Diversity, Household Dietary Diversity and Nutrition: Evidence from Uganda’s National Panel Survey (Manuscript Number: PONE-D-22-06649R2)

As noted in an earlier report, this paper examines associations between the diversity of crop and livestock products produced by households living in Uganda and measures of the diversity of their food consumption. This is a welcome addition to the literature as it includes new evidence from a country that previously had received relatively little attention. And again, the authors are to be commended for taking seriously the concerns raised in my second report and for extensively revising the paper.

Unfortunately, however, they have misunderstood a crucial comment that I had made. The issue is this. They seek to look at the associations between crop and animal diversity in production and measures of food consumption and food consumption diversity. They want to allow this relationship to be non-linear. However, they cannot use a quadratic specification because the second order term may have a negative coefficient, implying that at some point increased production diversity lowers consumption diversity. They cannot use a logarithmic specification because they may have zero values for their measures of production diversity.

The solution to this problem is to use an inverse hyperbolic sine (see Bellemare, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics); this allows for increases at a diminishing rate while also allowing for zero values in the independent variable (note that you will need to convert the parameter estimates to marginal effects; Bellemare provides the formulae for doing so). The authors include this in their model but also include a linear term. It does not make sense to include both. The models reported in Tables 2-6 should only include the IHS transforms of crop and animal diversity as well as other control variables.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: 1. Justifications for indicators selection (lines 95 – 160) are a little too long-winded. Although some redundancy can be useful, this section would be greatly improved by making it a lot more concise.

2. Re: "The reviewer makes a very valid observation that indeed the population consumes fewer protein foods as would be expected of rural populations, and we agree that this is noble to study. Unfortunately, we are building on our 2021 work where in the original data, we did not compute for proteins. However, we make a stark recommendation to expand consideration of macro and micronutrient studies to other nutrients, even though such wider coverage may be difficult in one paper, but done individually for each macro or micronutrient. The other constraint is that we may not cover every macro and micronutrient study in one paper, but we try our best to give a fair picture that can be compared across micronutrients, without actually getting lost into so much detail."

Yes, it would be useful to acknowledge the shortcoming and why you thought studying protein (and other micronutrients) in future research is important. But I don't seem to be able to locate these in the manuscript.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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Farm Production Diversity, Household Dietary Diversity and Nutrition: Evidence from Uganda’s National Panel Survey

PONE-D-22-06649R3

Dear Dr. Sekabira,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

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Reviewer #1: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

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Reviewer #1: No

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