Households who choose to adopt new agricultural technologies have a limited amount of labor they can invest in making those technologies productive and profitable. As part of a broader randomized controlled trial (RCT) in Burkina Faso, we explored how the adoption of a labor intensive fertilizer application technique changed how households invested labor into their sorghum production. We found that nuclear households invested the most labor into the new technique. Households made up of extended families invested less, which may be explained by how they organize their shared production. These findings could have implications for targeting agricultural innovations for increasing future food security.