Determinants of translating scientific soil and water management options towards farmers’ practices under stressed conditions

Abstract

Sustaining the livelihoods of the resource poor farmers under stressed environment become a real challenge both for technology developers as well as policy makers due to management needs of critical natural resources like soil and water. The land and water resources under the stressed environment in India are rich, valuable but under-utilised. Current productivity of the farming systems including agriculture and aquaculture are far below the inherent potential of the region. Enhancing agricultural production under stressed environment can improve the food security and contribute to poverty reduction. Development of technologies by Scientists/researchers alone cannot solve the problem of farming communities unless the process of technology dissemination is complemented by desired policy initiatives. Very often the technologists failed to understand why despite being their technologies economically viable, farmers are reluctant to own that technologies. Is it because the farmers’ behaviour is stubborn or irrational and they are afraid of any change? But the fact is farmers’ have to operate their farming operation under host of socio-economic conditions that affects their decision to adopt new technologies. Socio-economic factors like input prices, market environment, fragmented and small/marginal land holdings, availability of own or hired human labour, labour wage rates, financial and credit needs, availability and capacity to absorb, risk preferences etc, all these factors affect the adoption behaviour towards new technologies. Resource poor farmers, particularly under stressed environment are naturally risk averters and prefer to be safe than sorry. They tend to prefer a lower outcome that is relatively certain to the prospect of a higher return with a greater degree of uncertainty is attached. Farmers prefer stability of output even with a lower return rather the high-cost-high-return technologies where the instability of output is much higher. Several types of farm-level agricultural risks affect the crop cultivation; limits crop choice, reduces yield and have significant impact on farm income. Very often research experiments in farmers’ field indicated some encouraging results towards higher cropping system intensification and profitability. However, these evolved options are judged by the ratio of incremental return over incremental cost, and are being trade-offs with availability of alternative non-farm income sources and goes against agricultural options. For example, it is quite common for small farm households to derive 40 per cent or more of their income from off-farm activities. All these issues affect the adoptions of technologies related to soil and water management and hence are determinants to large scale adoption.