Agricultural Information Sources Used by Farmers in Imo State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study investigated the sources of agricultural information available to farmers in Imo State, Nigeria as well as the farmers' preferred sources. The ex-post facto research design was used for the study. A stratified proportionate sampling technique was used to select a sample of 1386 farmers across the existing 34 farm blocks and 63 farm cells in the Agricultural Development Programme (ADP) zones of the state. A self-developed and validated structured questionnaire was used for data collection. Two research questions were formulated to find answers to the sources of agricultural information to the farmers as well as the sources they preferred. A reliability co-efficient of 0.83 was obtained for the instrument using the Crombach apha. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. The results showed that 88.1 percent of the farmers indicated agricultural extension agents as their source of information, 71.2 percent indicated fellow farmers, 63.2 percent indicated radio, 43.3 percent indicated television, etc. The results further showed that majority (70.0 percent ) preferred the extension agent to the other media (radio 28.4 percent, friends and relatives 27.2 percent, television 19.1 percent, etc.) The results emphasize the need for the extension agency to regularly identify those sources of information that farmers prefer, or use most, as this will enable them deliver agricultural information effectively to the farmers.