Impact of National Fadama Development Project II on Rice farmers' profitability in Kogi State, Nigeria

This study examined the impact of National Fadama Development Project II on the profitability of rice farmers and assessed the extent to which the various innovations disseminated by the project were adopted by the rice farmer beneficiaries. The project which had all operating expenses cofinanced by the various key stakeholders also used community driven development (CDD) approach in extension service delivery. The study made use of primary data collected with the aid of interview schedule. The analytical tools used included descriptive statistics, adoption index and gross margin analysis (GM). The study employed the before and after model to determine the impact of the project on farmers profitability. The adoption index for rice production facilities, rice farming inputs and land preparation / planting distance were 0.34, 0.84 and 0.96, respectively. This implied that the farmers' adoption of the various rice production facilities was 34%, while rice farming inputs had 84% adoption level, and the various technologies on rice field preparation had 96% adoption level. Weeding was the rice farming activity with the highest cost, N 1,210: 40 and N 1,690: 50 for the years 2003 and 2009, respectively. The percentage gross margins per 0.5 ha of rice farm were 26.9% and 81.4% for before and after respectively which implied that fadama rice farmers had higher profitability as a result of the farmers' participation in the project.