Assessment of socioeconomic status of agroforestry farmers in Haridwar, Uttarakhand

Agroforestry is known to offer a wide range of livelihood benefits to farmers viz higher crop yields and incomes, greater food security and better resilience to climate change. The purpose and role of why agroforestry should be adopted are better explained by the farmers who adopt agroforestry as land management option. Hence this study was carried out with a purpose to know the socioeconomic status of farmers practicing agroforestry in Haridwar, Uttarakhand. A survey was done in the villages and 432 farmers were randomly selected from 36 randomly selected villages; 6 sample households were discarded as they could not generate appropriate data. Results revealed that 85.68 per cent of the total sampled farmers had adopted agroforestry out of which 19 out of every 20 agroforestry farmers were males. About one third (75.07%) of total agroforestry farmers considered farming their primary occupation and most of them (75.62%) considered agriculture as their major source of income. Over 90 per cent of the agroforestry farmers were formally educated; 64.66 per cent had adopted agroforestry in whole of their land. It was also found that in spite of having sufficient farming experience these farmers did not find themselves having enough knowledge of agroforestry. Despite of larger number of farmers having sufficient farming experience very few were sufficient in knowledge in agroforestry as they accepted themselves being not enough to understand it. The study concluded that the socioeconomic status of the farmers was satisfactory due to improvement brought out by adoption of agroforestry.