Smallholder farmers’ perception of Sustainable Land Management Practices (SLMPs) in the Upper West Region, Ghana

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ABSTRACT Cereal crop yields per acre have declined across sub-Saharan Africa over the years mainly due to declining soil fertility. In the context of other stressors such as climate change, declining yields continue to have negative effects on food security and environmental sustainability. In many poor-resource smallholder farming settings across the developing world including Ghana, the emphasis has shifted toward sustainable land management as a way to ensure food security and environmental sustainability. While the approach has gained popularity in policy circles, adoption has been slow especially among smallholder farmers. In this paper, we used quantitative methods to explore smallholder farmers’ (256) perceptions and adoption of three sustainable land management practices – animal manure, compost, and minimum tillage in two Districts in semiarid Northern Ghana. Our findings show positive perception index scores for animal manure, compost, and minimum tillage, respectively. It was found that the number of years of farming, household size, and the number of animals owned was positively associated with the adoption of animal manure while access to extension service and the ready market was negatively associated with the adoption of animal manure. The adoption of compost was positively associated with the number of years of farming, household size, and number of animals owned and negatively associated with farm size as well as the unit cost of production. The number of years of farming and access to ready markets positively and negatively influenced minimum tillage adoption, respectively. The joint adoption of any two or all three practices were equally influenced by some socio-economic, demographic, and plot characteristics. We argue that smallholder farmers perceive animal manure, compost, and minimum tillage positively in the midst of an ever-increasing decline in soil fertility and climate variability but their adoption is impeded by some socio-economic and demographic factors. We, therefore, recommend that Sustainable Land Management policies targeting smallholder farmers should take into consideration these socio-economic factors and plot characteristics of the farmer.