Adoption of bivoltine silkworm rearing practices by sericulturists in Karnataka

Sericulture is integrated with grain and vegetable cultivation with the farmers of Kolar district in Karnataka state. Considering the importance of increasing the production of bivoltine cocoons both sericulture scientists and extension workers have been advocating a good number of silkworm rearing practices for general adoption by the farmers. It was observed that there had been a slow or poor adoption of practices by the bivoltine silkworm rearers. Hence, the present study was carried out in five villages of Bangarpet taluk in Kolar district of Karnataka state during 2009–10 to analyze the adoption level of bivoltine silkworm practices by sericulturists and to find out the constraints faced by them in the adoption of bivoltine silkworm rearing practices. Pretested interview schedule was used to collect relevant information from 50 bivoltine silkworm rearers. The results revealed that as high as 76% of the sericulturists belonged to high/medium overall adoption levels of bivoltine silkworm rearing practices. Education, mass media use, participation in training programme, extension agency contact and extension participation of the sericulturists had significant to highly significant association with the adoption level of bivoltine silkworm rearing practices. A majority of 3/4th of the sericulturists had encountered the problems such as, bivoltine silkworms more prone to various diseases (98%), high risk involved in practising bivoltine silkworm rearing (90%), non-availability of quality disinfectants (82%) and quality silkworm seeds (76%) in the adoption of improved bivoltine rearing practices.