Adoption of community-based agricultural development project technologies among smallholder farmers in Kwara State, Nigeria

The study described socio-economic characteristics of the beneficiaries of the Community Based Agricultural and Rural Development Project (CBARDP), profiled the agricultural technologies disseminated and adopted. The study was carried out in Kwara State, Nigeria among smallholder farmers. A multi-stage sampling procedure was employed to select respondents who participated in CBARDP in Local Government Areas (LGAs). At the first stage, one participating LGA was purposively selected from each of the agricultural zones, making a total of nine LGAs. At the second stage, three rural communities were randomly selected from each of the selected LGAs while the final stage involved a simple random selection of ten participating farmers from the selected rural communities making a total of 270 respondents. Data collected were described with the frequency counts, percentages, means and standard deviations whereas Chi-square and correlation analyses were used for inferential purposes. The results showed that the mean age of farmers was 52.1 ± 6 years, majority (92.2 % and 74.1 %) were married and male, respectively. The overall results indicated a moderate level of adoption of CBARDP technologies but high adoption in orchard, fishery, poultry and cattle packages while the respondents had low adoption in livestock, processing, crop production and agro-processing packages. The results showed that significant associations existed between sex (χ² = 23.934), marital status (χ² = 34.66), membership of social organisation (χ² = 23.43), compatibility (χ² = 362.88, relative advantage (χ² = 211.69) and adoption of CBARDP technologies whereas there were significant relationship between household size (r = 0.201), farm size (r = 0.537), years of experience (r = −0.375) and farmers’ adoption of CBARDP technologies. The study concluded that adoption of CBARDP technologies was moderate among beneficiaries in the study area. It is therefore recommended that more awareness should be created by relevant stakeholders to encourage especially more women to actively participate in similar projects in the future.