Predictors of adoption of Conservation Agriculture Technology

Conservation agriculture (CA) has gained attention when the challenges of depletion of the basic resources of land and water have become alarming. However, despite the obvious productivity, economic, environmental and social advantages and benefits of CA, its adoption has not gained momentum. There are several constraints. However, there are farmers who have demonstrated the positive impact of CA technology on their farm. The present study was conducted in Indo-Gangetic Plains by drawing 200 farmers (100 adopters and 100 non-adopters of CA) with simple random selection technique from Meerut, Pratapgarh, Jaunpur and Sultanpur districts of Uttar Pradesh. Stepwise discriminant analysis revealed that Attitude to CA, Innovativeness, and CA knowledge with large coefficients stood out as those that strongly predicted classification of respondents as CA adopter or CA non-adopter farmer, while age, education, and farm size were found to be the weak predictors.