FACTORS INFLUENCING ADOPTION OF RECOMMENDED ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT PRACTICES BY CROP FARMERS IN SELECTED LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREAS OF JIGAWA STATE, NIGERIA

FACTORS INFLUENCING ADOPTION OF RECOMMENDED ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT PRACTICES BY CROP FARMERS IN SELECTED LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREAS OF JIGAWA STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract:

The studyevaluated factors influencing the adoption of recommended environmental management practices on agricultural production in three local governments of Jigawa State, Nigeria. Primary data were collected from 120 respondents using structured questionnaire. The statistical tools used to analyse the data were descriptive statistics, regression model. The result of the analysis shows that 37% of the respondents fall within the age range of 31-40years with an average of 42 years, 50% of the respondents had household size ranged from 1-5 people. The majority (76.7%) of the farmers are literate. About 43% of the farmers had farming experience range from 11-20 years. About 99% of the farmers finance their production through personal savings; majority (90%) of the farmers had land size ranging from 0.1-2.0 hectares. However, 94.2% of the farmers belong to one cooperative association or more while majority 57.5% of the crop farmers had no other source of income. The result of this study also shows that cumulative contributions of independent variables to the adoption of environmental management practices had coefficient of determination (R2 Adjusted) value of 0.58. This implies that all the variables together, explained about 58 percent of the total variability in adoption of environmental management practices in the study area. The relationship between selected socioeconomic and institutional factors and adoption of environmental management practices show that out of seven variables included in the analysis, four had significant influence on adoption of technologies. These were education, membership of cooperatives, amount of credit borrowed and extension contact. The effect of adoption of environmental management practices on income shows that mulching and crop rotation had significant positive influences on income of the farmers. Finally, the most important constraint to the adoption of environmental management practices were: pest and diseases, bulkiness of the technology, labour shortage and inadequate capital. The study showed that the promoted environmental management technologies that farmers were mostly aware of mulching (95.8%), use of organic waste (91.7%) and crop rotation (75%) and the least adopted were pesticide use (18.3%) and farmyard manure (19.2%). Extension agent (74.2%) was the important source of information on the promoted technologies while least important was television (23.3%). It is recommended that farmers should join cooperative societies as this would facilitate access to vital information and credit provided mostly by financial institutions.

FACTORS INFLUENCING ADOPTION OF RECOMMENDED ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT PRACTICES BY CROP FARMERS IN SELECTED LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREAS OF JIGAWA STATE, NIGERIA