October 2016 Vol. 4 No.10

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Eliud GM

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Original Research Article

Impacts of Extension Methods on Women Small Scale Farmers Adoption of Conservational Agriculture in Nakuru County, Kenya

Eliud Garry Michura

Kabarak University

Email: mican1990@yahoo.com

Accepted September 20, 2016

Abstract

This research paper analyzed the impacts of extension methods on adoption of conservation agriculture by women smallholder farmers in Nakuru County. Conventional agricultural practices have had serious effects on food production and biodiversity loss. To address environmental degradation, conservation agriculture (CA) has been proposed to solve food insecurity problem and biodiversity loss. In the study area, 70% of the farmers are women in small scale farming. The adoption of CA by women small scale farmers is very low and there is inadequate research documentation to explain the low adoption of CA. To find out why there is low uptake of CA by women farmers, a sample size of 360 women smallholders from 120, 000 women farmers was taken for survey. Purposive sampling was used for selecting three study sites and simple random sampling was used to select 120 respondents from each study site; Njoro, Naivasha, and Rongai. Descriptive survey design using structured questionnaires; interviews, personal observation and focus group discussion were used to collect data. Statistical Package for Social sciences (SPSS version 20) was used in the data analysis. Descriptive statistics; frequency distributions, means, proportions, percentages and inferential statistics; Chi-square, ANOVA, at alpha value= 0.05 (p < 0.05) level were employed to test the hypothesis. The findings concluded that extension methods significantly influenced women farmers’ adoption of CA. CA adoption was low and it was found that, some of the extension methods were not effective and not CA oriented. It was recommended that, use of sharing videos, ICT, schools and smart phones use be encouraged to improve effectiveness of extension methods.

Key words: Adoption, Conservation agriculture, Extension methods, Small-scale farmers