FARMERS’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS PRACTICING AQUACULTURE IN DINAJPUR DISTRICT

Abstract

The main purpose of the study was to determine and describe the selected characteristics of the farmers, to determine the attitude of the farmers towards practicing aquaculture and to explore the relationships between selected characteristics of the farmers with their attitude towards practicing aquaculture. Data were collected from randomly selected 110 fish farmers out of 330 farmers of three upazilas under Dinajpur district during 15 November to 15 December 2014, through personal interview. Simple and direct questions with different scales were used to obtain information. Co-efficient of correlation (r) was computed in order to explore the relationships between the farmers’ attitude towards practicing aquaculture and their eleven selected characteristics. The highest proportion (70.9 percent) of the farmers had favorable, 17.3 percent had not favorable and 11.8 percent had highly favorable attitude towards aquaculture. It is found that the majority (82.7 percent) of the respondent showed favorable to highly favorable attitude towards practicing aquaculture. The correlation analyses indicate that age, educational qualification, farm size, pond size, annual income, annual income from fisheries sources, knowledge on aquaculture and training needs for practicing aquaculture of the fish farmers had significant relationships with their attitude towards practicing aquaculture. The family size, organizational participation and extension media contact of the fish farmers had no significant relationships with their attitude towards practicing aquaculture.