Abstract:
Evidently, farmers’ innovativeness is important for agriculture and overall economic
development of one country, especially in today’s rapidly changing social and ecological
systems. Although, farmers have been considered as one of the key sources of innovation, many
studies on agricultural innovations often continue to consider farmers as passive adopters of
externally-driven technologies only. This thesis, in contrast, analyzes the innovativeness
behavior among maize farmers in the study area. To this end the aim of this study was to analyze
factors that affect farmers’ innovativeness on maize production, to assess the degree of farmers’
innovativeness, and to explore major challenges and opportunities of farmers’ innovativeness on
maize production system in the study area. A cross-sectional design was adopted, because the
duration of data collection and other activities took place within a limited time in 2019 the
production season. The study adopted multi-stage random sampling techniques to select 188
respondents from the study area. Interview schedule, focus group discussion and key informant
interview were used to gather the relevant data. The data were analyzed using descriptive
statistics, such as mean, standard deviations and frequency were used to summarize the data
while, a binary logistic regression model was fitted to identify the most important variables that
were influencing the farmers’ innovativeness. Fourteen explanatory variables were used for the
binary logistic model, out of which 7 were found to be positive and significantly affect farmers’
innovativeness. These were age of household heads, educational level, farm experience,
extension contact, livestock holdings, mass-media exposure and farm size of the households. The
study reveals that the major challenge of farmers’ innovativeness on maize production includes
poor extension delivery system, weak linkage among various actors, poor maize grain marking
system, prevalence of disease/pest and financial constraints. Generally, any development
practitioners, government and policy makers who work on farmers’ innovativeness should look
into these factors in the process of assessing farmers’ innovativeness to transform country’s
agriculture.
