Assessment of Losses of Jackfruit as Perceived by the Farmers

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to assess the losses of jackfruit as perceived by the farmers and explore therelationships of the selected characteristics of the jackfruit farmers with the losses of jackfruit as perceived bythem. The selected characteristics were age, level of education, jackfruit land size, number of jackfruit trees,annual income from jackfruit, experience in jackfruit cultivation, knowledge on jackfruit cultivation and problemfaced by the farmers. Data were gathered from 120 jackfruit farmers of six villages such as Kachina and Honparaof Bhaluka Upazilla, Donua and Nagar Haowla of Sreepur Upazilla and Naoghata and Sristighar of ShibpurUpazilla under Mymensing, Gazipur and Narsingdi districts respectively by using a structured interviewschedule. For harmonious representation from each village 10 percent sample were drawn following stratifiedrandom sampling method. Appropriate scales were formulated in order to assess the concerned variables. SPSSsoftware was used to probe the data and Pearson Product Moment Correlation Co-efficient was applied toexamine the relationship among the variables. The findings revealed that the highest proportion of the farmers(71.7 percent) perceived medium loss, while 17.5 percent perceived high loss and 10.8 percent of them perceivedlow loss in jackfruit production. Hence, overwhelming majority (89.2 percent) of the respondents perceivedmedium to high loss in jackfruit cultivation. The statistical analysis exposed that annual income from jackfruit,experience in jackfruit cultivation and knowledge on jackfruit cultivation of the jackfruit farmers had significantnegative relationship with the losses of jackfruit while problem faced by the jackfruit farmers had significantpositive relationship with the losses of jackfruit as perceived by them.

Key words: Loss assessment, Jackfruit, Farmer’s perception