- Fasoranti Olayiwola Olujenyo is at the Department of Sociology, Adekunle Ajasin University, Nigeria.
Abstract
This study examines the impact of the
Agricultural Development Programme (ADP) on the farmers
in the rural
areas of Ondo state, Nigeria, West
Africa. It examines the impact of the ADP on the farming operations of
its target farmers and the adoption
of the ADP's agricultural innovation, the
farmer-related
factors and the organizational factors that are
associated with the impact of the ADP. A structured
interview
schedule was used to elicit responses from
144 contact farmers and 144 non-contact farmers using random
sampling
to select the non-contact farmers,
and systematic sampling with a random start to select the
contact farmers from the 24 cells that had been
purposively selected from the zones. Correlation
analysis
was used to test the hypotheses formulated. The
results show that the majority of the farmers (51.39 per
cent)
fell within the ‘medium’ impact
level score on the impact table constructed. About 32
per
cent fell within the ‘high’ impact level score,
while 16.67 per cent fell within the ‘low’ impact level
score.
Four indicators of impact were used for this study,
namely, farm yield, size of land cultivated, adoption
of innovation and articles of convenience. The
results revealed that there was a significant difference
in
mean yields of the farmers before and
five years after the inception of the ADP in all the four crops
examined.
There was also a significant
difference between the mean score of hectarage of land cultivated
by the farmers before and since the inception of
the ADP. Furthermore, there was a significant difference
in the mean score of articles of convenience
possessed by the farmers before and 10 years after the
inception
of the ADP. The level of adoption of
10 innovations taught by the ADP to the farmers was ‘medium’.
That is, more than 60 per cent of the farmers
adopted between four and six innovations. Five
farmer-related
factors positively and significantly correlated
with the impact of the ADP, namely, age of the farmers (r
= 0.58612), number of children (r =
0.35114), years of formal education (r = 0.46571), size
of family labour (r = 0.2967) and
size of hired labour (r = 0.46167). The number of wives
of the farmers did not have a
significant association with the impact of the ADP. The critical value
of
r at 0.05 = 0.194.
Source: http://irm.sagepub.com/content/2/2/213.abstract
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