ABSTRACT

The study sought to identify the entrepreneurial skills required by Agricultural Education graduates in hydroponic gardening in southeast Nigeria. Five purposes guided the study; five research questions and five hypotheses were answered and tested respectively at .05 level of significance. Related literature was reviewed under conceptual, theoretical, empirical framework and summary of reviewed related literature. Survey research design was adopted for the study. The population of the study was 119 which comprised 75 crop production lecturers and 44 horticultural lecturers in the study area and this made up the total sample size because it is manageable. A structured questionnaire developed from the literature reviewed was used for data collection. The questionnaire was divided into parts A-F. Part A sought information on the respondent’s relevant personal characteristics and academic specializatiosn while parts B-G sought information in line with the purpose of study. Part B had 17 items, part C had 13 items, part D had 14 items, part E had 18 items, part F had 31 items, making it a total of 93 items. Each of Parts B-F had 4 response options of highly required (H.R)- 4 points, moderately required (M.R)-3 points, slightly required (S.R)-2 points and not required (N.R)- 1 point. The questionnaire was face validated by 5 validates in the field of Agricultural Education, crop science and crop research institute while Cronbach alpha was used to determine the internal consistency of 0.83. 119 copies of the questionnaire were administered to the crop production and horticultural lecturers in the study area with the help of 5 research assistants and all copies were retrieved (100%) and analyzed using mean and standard deviation for answering research questions and t-Test to test the null hypothesis. The study found out that the entrepreneurial skills required by agricultural education graduates in hydroponic gardening in southeast Nigeria were; 17 items in planning; 13 items in setting up a hydroponic greenhouse; 14 items in preparation of hydroponic nutrient solution; 17 items in plant establishment, and 30 items in management. It was also found that there was no significant difference between the mean responses of crop production and horticultural lecturers on the five hypotheses tested on the entrepreneurial skills required by agricultural education graduates in hydroponic gardening in southeast Nigeria. The study concluded that the findings were the basic skills required by graduates in hydroponic gardening. Among the recommendations made were that vocational skill acquisition centers should be established by the State government and the items used to form a module for training the graduates in hydroponic gardening, and that the identified skills should be properly articulated into secondary school agriculture (crop husbandry) by the Ministry of Education