Scaling up adoption of sawah rice production technology through on-farm demonstrations and farmers field days in Nigeria

This paper examined the effect of field days on scaling up of the adoption of sawah rice technologies among farmers in Nigeria. Data were collected with semi-structured surveys during field days organized in each of the sites on awareness and willingness to adopt sawah technology. Follow up visits were made to randomly selected 40 farmers using a large sample size technique of n >= 30 who participated in the field days to collect data on yield, adopters and farm size. The results show that awareness, number of adopters and willingness to adopt sawah technology, yield and farm size devoted to sawah technology increased after field days. Significant differences before and after field days were recorded, awareness (t = -3.46, p < 0.05), willingness to adopt (t = -5.96, p < 0.05), number of adopters (t = -2.71, p < 0.05), yield (t = 2.89, p < 0.05) and farm size (t = -2.61, p < 0.05). Higher mean scores were recorded for the variables after field days.