Personal and socio-economical variables affecting the adoption of maize production intervention program by dryland farmers in the Vuwani district, Limpopo Province

The study is aimed to find out whether development in the Vuwani district still consists of farmers, communities being told what to do; often by institutions which had not taken time to understand their rural needs. The results tend to be poor, as they did not feel the ownership of the ideas imposed to them. The role of independent, dependent and the intervening variables were not taken into consideration when the extension program was delivered to the farmers. Questionnaires, interviews supplemented by systematic field observation and recordings were the only feasible way of obtaining reasonably accurate data. Questions were kept short to the point to ensure the farmers being interviewed understood their meaning. The methods used for sampling procedure are randomness in such a way that each samples of a given size has the same chance of being selected. The number of clients were 405(four hundred and five) throughout the Vuwani district and only 58 (fifty–eight) respondents (farmers) qualified to represent the community. Data analysis was done manually using tables, figures and Statistical Packages for Social Science Programmes (SPSS) for statistical analysis listing chi-square tests and non-parametric correlation using Spearmans rho. The findings show that 57% of the respondents were females, the majority of respondent have access to only between one and two hectares of available land and 55% having less than ten years of farming experience. With regard to the adoption and implementation of the maize production practices, (intervention program presented by extension workers) 75% of the female respondents plant their maize at the correct time against only 25% of the males. Purchasing of seed, fertilizer were early adopted by experience farmers. Only two of the practices show no differences with all other independent variables namely weed control and crop rotation. An encouraging finding was the fact that farmers (respondents) with a small piece of land available adopted more of the critical production practices than farmers with larger areas of a land available to them. South African Journal of Agricultural Extension Vol. 35 (2) 2006: pp