Factors Affecting Commercialization of Smallholder Farming in Assam — A Study in Nagaon District

To identify the factors affecting commercialization of smallholders’ farming, a field survey was conducted involving small individual and family farms in Nagaon district of Assam. The farmers were selected following multistage stratified random sampling method. The level of commercialization has been found to be affected by the socio-economic characteristics such as land-size, age, family-size, access to market and access to credit. The value of R² was observed as 0.51, 0.76 and 0.82 in case of low, medium and high levels of commercialization, respectively, which indicated that nearly 51 per cent, 76 per cent and 82 per cent variations in all the three respective levels of commercialization was due to the effect of independent variables considered in the model, revealing a good predictive ability of the model. The size of farm and market accessibility were found to be highly significant compared to other variables in all the three groups. The factors like age, family size and credit accessibility didn't have any significant affect on the level of commercialization. It could be inferred that increase in size of farm and lesser distance to the market would result in increase in commercialization.