Correlates of socio-economic and psychological characteristics of the dairy farmers with the adoption of improved management practices

A field study to examine the correlates of socio-economic and psychological characteristics of the dairy farmers with the adoption improved management practices was conducted. Ex-post facto, a quasi-experimental design was used. A random sampling technique was employed to select the dairy farmers for the study. The investigation was carried out on a set on 60 trained and 60 untrained dairy farmers selected from the three districts namely Bathinda, Mansa and Sri Muktsar Sahib of Malwa region of Punjab. The 20 farmers who undergone training from the KVKs of above selected districts during the period of 2011–2013 were selected and referred as trained dairy farmers and for the comparative analysis, an equal matching sample of 20 untrained dairy farmers was also selected from each district. Thus, a sample of 120 dairy farmers was selected for the present study. The adoption was measured in the major four areas such as breeding, feeding, health care and miscellaneous management. The findings revealed that large proportion of the trained dairy farmers (70.00 per cent) were found in medium category of adoption followed by (30.00 per cent) high level of adoption, whereas, the 60.00 per cent of the untrained dairy were in medium category of adoption followed by (36.67 per cent dairy farmers who fell in the low category of adoption. The zero order correlation revealed that the characteristics of the trained dairy farmers such as education, dairy experience, herd size, annual Income, scientific orientation and market orientation were positively and significantly correlated at 0.01 level of probability with the adoption of the dairy practices whereas age and operational land holding, annual income and economic motivation were positively and significantly correlated at 0.05 level of probability. On the other hand, the characteristics of the untrained dairy farmers such as operational land holding herd size and annual income had shown a positive and significant correlation at 0.01 level of probability with adoption of the dairy practices and the family size, economic motivation were positively and significantly correlated at 0.05 level of probability.