Farmers‟ Innovativeness On Maize Production: In Limu Seka District, Jimma Zone Oromia Regional State, Ethiopia

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.