TRIBAL FARMERS’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS BIOCHAR PRODUCTION AND UTILIZATION FOR SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE

Abstract

The main purpose of the study was to determine the tribal farmers’ attitude towards biochar production and utilization for sustainable agriculture. Data were collected from 104 randomly selected tribal farmers out of 150 tribal farmers at Daudpur union of Nawabgang upazila under Dinajpur district, through personal interview. A pretested and structured interview schedule was used to collect data from the respondents during 15 March to 18 April, 2017. 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 ten selected characteristics of the tribal farmers and their attitude towards biochar production and utilization for sustainable agriculture. more than three-fourths (76.92 %) of the tribal farmers had highly favorable attitude towards biochar production and utilization for sustainable agriculture while 6.7 % moderately favorable attitude and only 1 % had slightly favorable attitude. It is found that the majority about 92.3 % of the tribal farmers showed moderately favorable to highly favorable attitude towards biochar production and utilization for sustainable agriculture. Correlation analyses indicated that among ten selected characteristics farm size, annual household income, training received, credit received, organizational participation and contact with extension media of the Tribal farmers had positive significant relationships with their attitude biochar production and utilization for sustainable agriculture. However, age, education, family size and cosmopoliteness had no significant relationships with their attitude towards biochar production and utilization for sustainable agriculture. The highest problem faced by the tribal farmers in implementing of biochar production and utilization was found on ‘Lack of woody fuel’ (PFI =228). Lowest proportion of tribal farmers faced problems on ‘need kerosene for initially fire’ (PFI =50).