The Role of Indigenous Knowledge in Conservation Agriculture: The Case of Lare District in Gambella Region, Ethiopia

Abstract

This study seeks to identify indigenous conservation agriculture practices by conducting key informant survey on 15 households and to analyze factors influencing the probability of using minimum tillage by employing cross-sectional survey data collected from 120 households using logit model with.STATA12. The findings revealed that farmers had considerable knowledge about minimum tillage, spacing, and row cropping, intercropping and shifting grazing land were the merits for conservation agriculture. Improper seed rate, absence of farm yard manure as fertilizer and burning of crop residues were demerits. The survey respondents were drawn from Lare district of Nuer Zone in Gambella region. The survey result yields households having greater number of livestock and farm labor, good perception of traditional technology and larger size of land are more likely to utilize minimum tillage. By contrast, households having non-farm activity has a strong and negative effect on minimum tillage. This suggests that policy makers can scale up the use of minimum tillage by facilitating a medium of knowledge transfer from elders to youths as age is positively correlated with livestock holding, number of farm labor and land holding as well as minimum tillage, by diffusing the importance of conservation agriculture and by creating awareness about the benefits of diversifying economic activities to split risks by using their resource abundance and endowment advantages.

Keywords: indigenous knowledge, conservation agriculture, minimum tillage, logit model

DOI: 10.7176/ISDE/11-1-02

Publication date: January 31^st 2020