Abstract
Scientific evidence suggests that there is room for eradicating poverty and hunger by increasing food production through the adoption of modern agricultural practices by farmers. This study aimed, first, to explore the relationship between the farmers’ awareness and adoption of improved wheat varieties. Second, it aimed to find the key factors that govern the farmers’ awareness and adoption of extension-recommended innovations in the rainfed cropping system of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. Data were collected from 395 respondents. A binary logit model was used to analyze the effect of the farmers’ socioeconomic and farm-specific characteristics on their awareness and adoption of the extension-suggested wheat varieties. Moreover, qualitative data from 40 key informants were collected for in-depth analysis. The results show a strong association between the farmers’ awareness of a technology (improved wheat varieties) and its adoption. The results of the logit model show that their extension contacts, income from agriculture, and access to credit positively affected the farmers’ awareness, whereas their education and household sizes negatively affected their awareness. Moreover, the factors that positively influenced the farmers’ decision to adopt the technology included the extension contact, the confidence in the extension, the risk-bearing attitude, and the credit access, whereas the household size and education negatively affected it. The results of the key informant interviews reveal that the high incidence of poverty, the low soil fertility, the farmers’ inability to make effective decisions, the lack of accurate weather predictability in the rainfed farming system, the lack of government interest, and the asymmetric information in the inputs markets contributed to the farmers’ low levels of awareness and to their poor adoption of improved agricultural technologies. These results indicate that any intervention aimed at the awareness and adoption by farmers of improved technologies, such as new wheat varieties, should recognize the heterogeneity in the farmers’ socioeconomic and farm-specific characteristics.
Highlights
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with their aim of eradicating poverty in all its forms and ensuring zero hunger by 2030, are still the main challenge that the world faces [1]
The results indicate that the aware famers who adopted the extension-recommended wheat varieties had risk-bearing attitudes and better extension contacts, as compared to the unaware farmers who did not adopt them
The results show significant associations between the farmers’ awareness and both their risk-bearing attitudes and extension contacts (Table 1)
Summary
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with their aim of eradicating poverty in all its forms and ensuring zero hunger by 2030, are still the main challenge that the world faces [1]. The agricultural sector’s growth is key for improving rural livelihoods, alleviating poverty and hunger, and ensuring economic growth, especially in developing countries [1,2]. In this context, the roles of the awareness and the adoption of technological. Agricultural technologies have been regularly developed and their uses are promoted for the benefit of farmers and include the genetic improvements of seeds, climate-smart technologies, fertilizers, and integrated pest management strategies [4]. In the developing world especially, the adoption of these agricultural technologies has remained low [6].
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