Perception and adoption of soil health card (SHCS) recommendations by the farmers in Anantapuram district

Soil is the basic component of agriculture which contains nutrients and provides to plant for proper growth. The soil quality has deteriorated in recent past due to indiscriminate usage of fertilisers and imbalance use of chemicals. Considering these facts, the Government of India (GOI) has launched a flagship programme aimed at providing information on available nutrient status in the soil for selecting suitable crops. With this backdrop, the present exploration was carried out to evaluate the level of perception and adoption of soil health cards (SHCs) by the farmers in Anantapuram District of Andhra Pradesh during 2019–2020. The primary data for the exploration was collected by survey method adopting personal interview of the selected respondents through well-developed and pre-tested interview schedule with the objective of finding out the perception and adoption level of soil health card based fertilizer application in Anantapuram district of Andhra Pradesh. The research areas were selected randomly and ex post facto design was used. The result showed that, the perceived ability of the farmers on soil health cards was medium (45%) and merely 33 per cent of the farmers are adopting soil health card recommendations in their fields whereas 67 per cent of farmers are not following soil health card recommendations. The study further revealed that, extension agency contact, education, trainings undergone and perception on SHC were found to be the key significant factors influencing the adoption of soil health card results by the farmers. Major Constraints in adopting the SHC recommendations were, difficulty in understanding the information given in the soil health card and calculating fertilizer dose on the basis of nutrient status of soil, unscientific method of collecting soil samples. Regular trainings to the farmers on soil sample collection procedure followed by interpreting recommended dose of fertilizers will create the positive intent among the farmers in adopting the SHC recommendation for sustainable soil health management.