Adoption of Recommended Fertilizer dose in Farmer’s Field of Bangladesh

Abstract

The study was conducted to explore the farmer’s level of adoption of recommended fertilizer dose in the field. A survey was conducted at Batiaghata upazila of Khulna, Bangladesh during January to February in 2019 on purposive randomly selected 120 respondents in respect of selected twelve variables. The selected variables (characteristics of the respondents) were age, educational qualification, family size, farming experience, annual family income, farm size, organizational participation, agricultural training, cosmopolitanism, extension contact, attitude and practice. Two aspects of adoption i.e., innovativeness (time dimension) and extent of adoption (spatial dimension) of recommended fertilizer dose were considered as the focus variables. Data analysis was performed using SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) software version 20.0. To explore the relationship between the concerned variables Pearson’s Product Moment Coefficient of Correlation (r) for ratio data and Spearman’s Rank Order Correlation Coefficient (ρ) for ordinal data were employed. The result showed that majority of the respondents were old aged (41.7%), had secondary level of education (56.70%), belonged to small family size (50%), had high annual family income (66.7%) and high farming experience (40%) with small farm size (76.67%). Majority of the respondents had low organizational participation (44.16%), low contact with extension agent (57.5%) and medium cosmopolitanism (57.5%) and had no agricultural training (59.2%). Findings also revealed that majority of the respondents (62.5%) showed high positive attitude towards adoption of recommended fertilizer dose. About half of the respondents (43.3%) belonged to medium practice category of recommended fertilizer dose in the field. Considering the innovativeness still 45.83% of the respondents belonged to late majority to laggard category of innovation diffusion, and still 36.66% land is not under recommended fertilizer dose application which significantly differ from the amount of land under recommended fertilizer dose application. Among 120 respondents there was no innovator. Among twelve variables age and farming experience had significant positive relation with their innovativeness, and educational qualification, annual family income, farm size and extension contact had significant positive relation with their extent of adoption of recommended fertilizer dose. Thus, it might be concluded that, the remaining farmers should be motivated to adopt and the remaining land should be practically taken under proper application of recommended fertilizer dose to sustain agricultural production in the field.