Parametric assessment of household's food intake, agricultural practices and health in rural South West, Nigeria

Abstract

Food intake and health are important component of agriculture. The contribution of these duo have a lot to say about the productivity of farmers in the nations of the world. The results presented here relied on data collected on households' food intake nutrition and health profile through multistage random sampling of 420 households selected from the Southwest, Nigeria using well-structured questionnaires. Descriptive statistics (percentage, frequency, mean) and inferential statistics (Logistic regression and Negative Binomial). The result shows that the farmers were ageing, given an average of (53 ± 11.44 years). The Logistic regression model of the effect of farming households food intake on health showed that gender of the households' head, marital states of the head, household food security and knowledge of nutrition significantly reduced the probability of reporting good health while the educational year(s) of the farmers, total cost of health and consumption of fruit increased it. In addition, the Negative Binomial Regression model, employed in the assessment of the effect of farming households' nutrition on health indicated that gender, marital status, and consumption of milk and total cost of health significantly increased day(s) incapacitated while the year(s) of education reduced it. It was therefore concluded that diversity of food intake among the farmers was low. Ageing, education and large household size among others, were also identified as major problem among the rural farmers. It was however recommended that considerable investment in human capital should be encouraged since food diversity and nutrition education enhances households’ food intake and health status.