Analysis of Improved Technologies’ Adoption by Male and Female Rice Farmers in Abia State

Technology adoption has been noted as very crucial to increasing local production of rice in Nigeria, especially among the smallholder farmers. The study broadly analyzed improved technology adoption among male and female rice farmers in Abia State, Nigeria. The study examined the adoption of improved rice technologies by male and female rice farmers in Abia state, Nigeria. Multistage sampling technique was employed in data collection using structured questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed using simple descriptive statistics and inferential tools such as the probit model. The study revealed that mean off-farm income of male and female rice farmers were 15694.44 and 8812.5 naira respectively while their mean farm sizes were 1.08 and 0.57 hectares respectively, implying that the female gender was more resource-constrained than the male farmers. Improved rice varieties, pudling, chemical fertilizer, appropriate spacing and bird-scaring technologies were the improved technologies adopted by majority of both male and female rice farmers while tractor, Fadama technology, herbicide, pesticides, minimum tillage and organic manure were poorly adopted by both genders. Majority of male (54.17%) and female (80.56%) rice farmers were non adopters of improved technologies. The result showed further that the male farmers had higher adoption rate of 70.21% compared to the female farmers whose adoption rate was 29.79%. This could be linked to the fact that the male rice farmers are more business-oriented than the female farmers and are more fitted to the drudgery nature of rice production than the female farmers. The Probit result showed that the pseudo R2 was 0.6406, 0.5050 and 0.7873 for male, female and pooled result respectively. The probability of adoption of technologies by farmers was statistically and significantly determined by age of the household head, educational level of the farmer, extension services received by the farmers during the production period, off-farm income, access to credit, and farming experience. The study concludes that both genders were actively involved in rice production but the female gender was more resource-constrained. It is recommended that extension services be strengthened, tractor hiring services be provided, and gender-related limitations to accessing production resources be revised.