Abstract
Potato production plays an important role in improving household income and nutrition and thereby contributes to food security. Despite of this, the current productivity of the crop is below the potential. Low level of use of improved potato technology package is among the causes for low productivity. In this context, this study analysed the factors influencing adoption of potato technology package by smallholder farmers in Gurawa, Haramaya, Kombolcha, Meta, and Habro districts of Eastern Ethiopia. The analysis was based on a household survey conducted on 214 randomly selected potato growing households. A two-limit Tobit model was used to analyse the factors affecting adoption which is measured in an index computed from five components of the technology package. Variation in districts, access to irrigation, farm size, membership to cooperatives, and annual income of the households were found to significantly affect the adoption of potato technology package. Policy makers, planners and development practitioners are required to give due attention to these determinants in order to support smallholder farmers in production and productivity improvements from potato production.
Highlights
Potato (Solanum tuberosam L.) is among the major food crops produced in the world (Knapp 2008; Nyunza and Mwakaje 2012) in which Ethiopia is inclusive
Where y* is unobserved for values less than 0 and greater than 1. It represents an index for potato technology package adoption, Xi represents a vector of explanatory variables, βi is a vector of unknown parameters, and εi is the error term
While considering all the five components of potato technology package jointly, the overall adoption index is about 63% of the recommended package
Summary
Potato (Solanum tuberosam L.) is among the major food crops produced in the world (Knapp 2008; Nyunza and Mwakaje 2012) in which Ethiopia is inclusive. It is the fourth most important food crop in the world on the basis of production after maize, rice, and wheat with annual production accounts of nearly 300 million tons (Naz et al 2011). In Ethiopia, for example, the total production from potato was 943,233 tons with an average productivity of 13.5 t/ha. It ranks first in area coverage and third in both total production and productivity among the root crops grown in Ethiopia (CSA 2016)
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