|
Experiment Background
|
Natural Farming is a chemical-free and livestock based diversified farming system that integrates crops, trees and livestock, allowing the optimum use of functional biodiversity. It holds the promise of enhancing farmers’ income while delivering many other benefits, viz. as restoration of soil fertility and environmental health, mitigating and/or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Natural Farming builds on natural or ecological processes that exist in or around farms. Natural Farming offers a solution to various problems, such as food insecurity, farmers’ distress, health problems arising due to pesticide and fertilizer residue in food and water, global warming, climate change, natural calamities etc. Natural Farming is considered a form of regenerative agriculture-a prominent strategy to save the planet. It has the potential to manage land practices and sequester carbon from the atmosphere in soils and plants, where it is actually useful instead of being detrimental. These things change a trend of farming community towards natural farming.
Training and information plays a vital role when any go for new enterprise. Timely training and credibility of information & sources of information are directly and indirectly influencing to farmers. Keeping this in view, it was felt worthwhile to study “Training needs and information seeking behavior of the farmers about natural farming in South Gujarat”. |
|
Research Methodology
|
Research Design: Ex-post facto research design
All the seven districts of South Gujarat namely; Navsari, Valsad, Tapi, Narmada, Surat, Bharuch and the Dangs will be selected for present investigation. Among them, two districts will be selected for first year, two districts will be selected for second year and three districts will be in third year. The two talukas from each district and two villages from each taluka will be randomly selected thus, total 28 villages selected for the study. The 11 farmers will be randomly selected from each village as respondents and thus, 308 respondents will be interviewed. An interview schedule will be developed after due consultation with the faculty members of the discipline and the data will be collected by following the personal interview method. The collected data will be tabulated and analyzed with appropriate statistical tools/techniques like ranking, percentage, frequency, mean, standard deviation, arbitrary methods to formulate the inference.
|