Farmers’ adoption pattern in high yielding oil palm plantation - A survey

Abstract

The Oil Palm (Elaeis guineensis), a high oil yielding crop is introduced in India to meet the vegetable oil demand and bridge the gap between the demand and supply of vegetable oil. Oil Palm is cultivated in an area of 2,06,000 ha in identified potential states in India. Government of India is making earnest efforts to promote Oil Palm. Technological advancement through oil palm hybrids and improved package of practices developed are being adopted by the farmers, several individual farmers are in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have been able to get as high as 35 tons FFB/ha/year. The production & productivity, however, remained very low at the state level i.e. 5t/ha (AFC Report, 2002) due to various factors. Several studies have shown that adoption of improved package of practices, wherever adopted, has lead to increased yield, income, and employment and over all welfare of the farming families (Reddy, 2002; Attawar, 2000). In order to identify the adoption pattern and practices that contributed for high yields in oil palm, a study was conducted among the farmers who attended farmers training programmes at Directorate of Oil Palm Research, Pedavegi to find out the practices / factors contributed to higher yields in oil palm plantations. One hundred and fifty farmers who obtained ≥ 20 tons/ha were purposively selected among the 3760 farmers who attended the training programme on oil palm cultivation at Directorate of Oil Palm Research, during 2003-2010. Nine independent variables viz., land holding; age of plantation; frequency of irrigation (basin method), organic manures applied; application of fertilizers i.e. N,P,K,B, Mg; frequency of fertilizer application and FFB yield as depended variable were selected. Data was collected from the farmers through open ended questionnaire. Simple frequency and percentage were calculated based on the variable measured by taking highest and lowest score in that category. Data collected were tabulated, analysed and interpreted using frequency, percentage and correlation coefficient