Information And Training Needs Of Cotton Farmers On Their Farming Activities In Zambia

A major reason for farmers' poor yield of farm products and low returns may be adduced to dearth of statistics and teaching about their farming activities. This study, thus, focused on the cotton farmers' information and training needs required their farming activities in Zambia. A simple random sampling technique was used to select 86 cotton farmers for the study. Descriptive statistics were used to examine the data collected while the Kruskal-Wallis H test was used to test the hypothesis. The results revealed that the mean age of the cotton farmers was 45 years while their average yearly income was ZMW 2061.62. The cotton farmers' attendance of business skill development training (chi 2 = 14.9), steady farm budget operations (chi 2 = 5.16), consistent farm financial analysis execution (chi 2 = 4.96) and information and training needs on fertilizer (chi 2 = 12.56), pesticides (chi 2 = 4.69), labour (chi 2 = 17.7), sources of inputs (chi 2 = 19.78), cost on household expenses (chi 2 = 8.68), methods of calculating profit from farming activities (chi 2 = 5.18), income generation from farming activities (chi 2 = 5.97) and non farming activities (chi 2 = 6.02) were significantly different in the agro-ecological regions of Zambia. The study concluded that cotton farmers' training needs are location-specific. Meaningful and effective training, therefore, require that training institutions need to identift the training needs of farmers in the different agro-ecological regions and develop appropriate training modules for these different regions. This has the potential of higher returns of farm-based productivity and profitability of cotton farmers in Zambia.