Impact of Training on Modern Machineries and Improved Agricultural Technologies towards Cognitive Assessment of Farmers

Abstract

In the era of fast changing technology, training has become an integrated part of investment for accelerating transfer of technology to people of all walks of life. The well-established network of organizations spread over the length and breadth of the country. The budget spent on training has tremendously increased over the past few years. with this background the study under taken at Trichy district, Tamil Nadu state of a country India by employing purposive sampling procedure. Agricultural Engineering College & Research Institute, Kumulur is one of the constituent colleges of Tamil Nadu Agricultural University located in Trichy. It is a pioneer institute in Tamil Nadu doing research on Agricultural Engineering technologies and Machinery. It is being chosen by the Tamil Nadu Govt. for state level capacity development trainings of farmers under the Agricultural Technology Management Agency and Agrl. Engineering Department (AED). Using simple random sampling procedure 10 farmers (trainees) were selected from 18 Districts of Tamil Nadu who were visited the institution during the study period. (180 sample size). The major objectives, as study of socioeconomic profile and knowledge assessment during pre and post training on Farm Machineries, Bio-energy, Agricultural Processing, Soil and Water Conservation, Drip irrigation and improved Agricultural sciences. Among 180 respondents, Majority of them were old age group (38.89 %) studied primary education (30.00 %) equally spread in marginal and small land holdings (around 75 %), possessed high level of farming experience (38.89 %) had medium level of extension agency contact (47.78 %), possessed medium level of Information seeking behaviour (53.89 %) with a medium level of Innovativeness (42.78 %). Knowledge test was assessed prior to training, among 180 respondents, Majority of farmers belonged to the medium level of knowledge category on all six categories and the after training knowledge test showed that the respondents belonged to low level were distributed in medium to high level of knowledge category and the medium level was elevated to high level category. The alternate hypothesis (H1)was proved through ‘ t’ test that there was a significant difference prevailed in the knowledge level of the respondents acquired through the trainings conducted on the recently developed Agrl. Technologies and modern machineries.