Socio-economic factors affecting the technology adoption level of sugarcane in rainfed sector in Sevenagala

Abstract

Sugarcane (Saccharum spp) is an important commercial crop cultivated in Sri Lanka over an area of 18,500 hectors. At present domestic sugar production is 56,000 tones per annum, which was sufficient to meet only 9% of the local requirement. The national average yield is 55 tones per hectare. The potential yield is more than two times of that. Non adoption of the technologies was considered as the one of the major reasons for this yield gap. Thus the objective of this study was to find out the technology adaptive level and the socio-economic factors which affect the technology adoption level. The study was conducted in rainfed sector in Sevenagala sugar industry from April to May in 2009. The farmer survey was conducted with 50 farmers which cover a population of approximately 1000 farmers in 3 divisions. Recommended Technology Adoption Index (RTAI) was developed using the scores obtained from the extension officers for twenty two technologies according to the contribution for increment of yield and adoption level of farms using five rating point likert scale (strongly adopt, adopt, poor adopt, very poor adopt, and not adopt). RATI can be used as an indicator of technology adoption levels of each farmer. The correlation between RTAI and yield was 62.26%. Average technology adoption index of study area was 0.7213 with minimum 0.46 and maximum of 0.89. Empirical model was developed to see the relationship between the recommended technology adoption and ten independent variables namely age, monthly income, education, experience, family labour involvement, farmers’ visit of extension office, member of social association, farmer group meetings, frequency of field visit of extension officer, information obtained through the leaflet. Ordered Logistic Regression technique was used to estimate the coefficient of the model, to which four levels for the dependent variables was derived using the range of values of the RTAI. The results revealed that the adoption of recommended technologies was significantly influenced by the monthly income, being a member of social association and farmers’ visit of extension office. Increment of access for loans and strengthening the extension service is suggested to enhance the technology adoption level of sugarcane cultivation.