Assessment of agricultural production information needs of women farmers in Osun State, Nigeria

This paper assessed the agricultural production needs of women farmers in Osun state, Nigeria. It is argued that women are responsible for generating food security for their families in developing countries and the contribution of women to agricultural production over the years has been acknowledged. Thus, there is the need to make available to them appropriate production information to enhance their productivity and contribution to agriculture and rural development. To achieve the main objective, the study identified the socio-economic characteristics of the respondents, determined the activities carried out under agricultural production by the respondents, identified the respondents’ sources of information, their accessibility to these sources and investigated constraints faced by the women farmers in agricultural production. With a simple random sampling technique, a total of one hundred and four (104) respondents were selected for the study which primary data was obtained through interview schedule based on the stated objectives of the study. Frequency counts, percentages and mean values were used as descriptive statistics while Pearson Product Moment Correlation was used to determine the relationship between the socio economic characteristics of the respondents and agricultural production information needs of women farmers. The results of the findings revealed that the mean age of the women farmer was calculated to be 41.25. Also, most of the women farmers had between 5 and 9 members in their household. 75.0% had one form of formal education or the other with 94.2% of the women being married. The most highly accessible sources of information to the women were radio and ADP extension workers. The result of the findings also revealed that the areas where agricultural production informations are needed include record keeping (0.58), linkage with input supply (0.52), and acquisition of land and credit (0.48). A significant relationship was found between house hold size (0.272**), level of income (0.448**) and agricultural production information needs of women farmers. High cost of farm input and insufficient capital were ranked as the most serious constraints. Therefore, the study recommended that Government should try as much as possible to subsidize the cost of farm input so as to increase agricultural production and credit facilities should be made available to women farmers in order to increase their scale of production.