Assessment and Correlates of Dryland Technologies Adoption by Farmers in Namakkal District of Tamil Nadu

The ever increasing demand for food coupled with significant decline in irrigation source make dryland farming highly important in meeting the food requirements of future generation. Dryland farming to be economically feasible warrants adoption of improved technologies. The study conducted among each of 100 small and big farmers in Namakkal district of Tamil Nadu revealed that 65.5% of dryland farmers adopted less than 25% of improved dryland technologies. Among two categories of farmers, a significant difference was observed in the overall adoption level. Dryland technologies such as use of farmyard manure, summer ploughing, and weeding with hand hoe had more adoption scores of 0.98, 0.72 and 0.645, respectively. Some critical dryland technologies like contour bunding, farm pond construction, drip irrigation, construction of rainwater harvesting structures showed poor adoption rate.