Economics of good agronomic practices adoption by rice farmers in value chain development programme, Anambra State, Nigeria

Abstract

The study was on the economics of good agronomic practices adopted by rice farmers in the value chain development programme, Anambra State, Nigeria. The specific objectives focused primarily on the extent of good agronomic practice (GAP) adoption, cost and returns from GAP rice production, resource use efficiency and challenges of GAP adoption in the study area. Data were collected through a well-structured questionnaire from a cross-section of 337 (representing 91% of the approved sample size) rice farmers randomly selected by multi-stage sampling procedures. A combination of analytical techniques was used to operationalize the models. The study established that farmers did not adopt any technology disseminated at a pre-planting stage of rice farming, but adopted timely planting, bund making for water management and weed and/ or pest control in the planting stage of the technologies, while winnowing and proper storage of paddy had been successfully adopted at the post-planting stage. Evidently, about 50% of the technologies disseminated in the study area are under trial or consideration stage. From the profitability analysis, the study revealed a 59% return on investment for every 1 USD invested. However, the project implementers need to reduce the cost of fertilizer and labour, these could be achieved through increasing beneficiaries’ budget on fertilizer by 12.4% and over 100% for labour through mechanization to justify the estimation of resource allocation efficiency which reported inefficiency for all the plating inputs. The study equally identified some factors militating against the adoption of GAP which were rotated into four components named institutional, socioeconomic, and economic and management factors. These four factors: institutional (24.5%), socioeconomic (10.9%), economic (10.5%) and management (9.5%) accounted for 55.4% of the challenges to GAP adoption. The study, therefore, concludes that GAP has not been fully adopted by farmers, this is because one-time use of technology does not guarantee its adoption. However, efforts should be prioritized by the appropriate authorities to tackle the identified challenges since the gain in rice production is worthwhile. Key words: rice farmers, adoption, good agronomic practice, value chain development