Abstract:
The study examined the effects of ageing on farmers’ level of involvement in rice production activities in Ekiti State, Nigeria. A questionnaire was used to gather data from one hundred and thirty-five (135) rice farmers through multistage sampling technique. Descriptive statistics were used to identify the socio-economic characteristics of the rice farmers, determine labour use pattern in rice production activities, compute rice production output, identify strategies adopted to cope with ageing and determine level of access to input for rice production activities in the study area. All the hypotheses were tested using the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA).Farmers were mostly male (77.8%), smallholders farmers (1.7±0.8 hectare) and had 30.8 years of experience earned an average of N243,103 per annum. The farmers were not highly involved in any of the productive activities, but had an average participation index in land preparation (2.42 ± 1.43), planting (2.55 ± 1.53), weeding (2.63 ± 1.41), bird scaring (2.30 ± 1.30) and harvesting (2.37 ± 1.68). Labour employed by the rice farmers was mostly hired labour. The average output of rice in Ekiti State was 46.4 bags of rice when the farmers were young, 45.1 bags for the farmers during their middle ages (31 to 50 years) and currently, they produced 44.6 bags. There was no significant difference in output across the age groups (F=1.04 p-value ≥ 0.05). The farmers made use of a number of strategies for coping with effects of ageing in their production activities such as reducing their work hours (2.58), reducing their level of involvement in production activities (2.33) and use of herbicide (2.35). The farmers had high access to cutlass (3.70), hoe (3.70), knife (3.73), rice seed (3.73), labour (3.54) and land (3.71) but minimal access to plough (0.55 ± 0.94), planter (0.48 ± 0.83), harvester (0.33 ± 0.79) and extension service (1.71 ± 1.23). There was a significant difference among age groups in level of involvement in rice production activities. Generally, there was significant difference among age group in the level of access to agricultural inputs, but there was no significant difference in level of access when farmers were 31-50 years and when >50 years. It is therefore recommended that government should make farm machineries easily accessible to the farmers. Also, extension services should be extended to the farmers at regular intervals.
