Impact of Irrigation on Rice Cultivation Methods among Small Farmers in North Central, Nigeria

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Rice production and irrigation are inextricably linked, irrespective of the adopted cultivation system. The study was to examine the impact of irrigation on rice cultivation systems among rice farmers in north central Nigeria. The study involved the survey of 196 active rice farmers in the previous planting season using copies of well-structured questionnaires administered by trained enumerators, and selection of rice farmers was achieved through multistage sampling procedure. Specific objectives were to describe socioeconomic and input characteristics, profiling of irrigation water sources, identification of adopted source of irrigation water by rice farmers, assessment of cultivation system adoption and intensity of rice production and examining factors militating against access to seamless access to irrigation water. Various analytical tools were employed to achieve the objectives, such as descriptive statistics, multinomial logit (MLN), endogenous switching regression (EWR) and Likert Rating Scale (LRS). The result indicated that farm size, farming experience, and annual income were on average of 2.39ha, 23.6 years, and N 646,145.66k. Well water was the most used irrigation source by farmers, with the highest score of 85.2%. The multinomial logit result indicated that the use of boreholes was positively and significantly influenced by distance to water source and years of education, while the use of dams was influenced by gender and the number of cooperative trainings that rice farmers attended during the season. Switching regression results suggested that the correlation coefficient rho_1 and rho_2 were positively significant at p<0.01 and p 0.05, respectively, suggesting that an individual rice farmer who chose to adopt swamp cultivation system had lower rice output in the category than a random individual from the sample would have realized. Farmers were constrained by the shortage of water arising from keen competition for water between them and the herdsmen, while it was recommended that efforts be made to ensure that an early-maturing, drought-resistant, and short-duration rice variety be provided for optimal production that will keep pace with the food needs of an ever-increasing population.