ABSTRACT

The study was designed to evaluate Root Crop farmers' participation in agricultural research in Abia State, Nigeria. A five-staged sampling technique was used in the data analysis and other statistical tools like frequencies, percentages, means and logit regression analysis were applied to generate the desired results. Socio-economic characteristic of fanners were found to have played a prominent role in influencing participation of farmers in agricultural research and the characteristics included age, level of education, membership of cooperative and the mean age for participants and non-participants was middle age 46 years. The 90% of the participants acquired secondary and tertiary education while 68.8% of non-participants acquired at most primary education. There were relatively fewer males and more females participating in agricultural research in the study area. More single respondent participated in research. In addition 50% of both participants and non-participants had house hold size of 6 to 10 persons. The 61.5% of the participants were uuill time famers and majority of about 60.4% of the non-participants were parttime farmers. There were high levels of farmers' participation in research since 11 out of 13 research activities were highly participated and it was obvious that these 11 research activities were more bottom-top (adaptive) approached than top-bottom. The research activities such as Selection of farm sites, On-Farm Adaptive Research (OFAR) and General Feedback on Research Finding had the highest level of participation and ranked first among others. While Diagnostics' Survey and On-Farm Research (OFR) mean scores below 3.0 and ranked sixth (last). The research activities were collaborative, consultative and contract forms of participation. The 62.5% of the participants had their income range between N100,000 toN199,000 while 78% of the non-participants had their income range within N10,000 to N99,000. Participants farm-output (N251, 953) was higher than those of non-Participants farm-output (N 115,355).There was significant difference between the output of participants and non-participants since the Z-cal 2.114 was greater than Z-tab 1.645 at 95%. Farmers' perception showed that participant in research benefited in general improvement to their over-all farm productivity. Constraints faced by the farmers in cause of their participation in research ranged from lack of access to credit/finds, unfriendly training strategies and insufficient farm input for farming system research. Recommendations are that farmers should participate in the management and monitoring of research farming system practices in Nigeria through government support.