Impact Assessment on Adoption of Soil Health Cards for Fertilizer Management in Tiruvallur District

Abstract

Soil Health plays a vital role to ensure agricultural production in a sustainable manner. The basic objective of the soil testing is to provide recommendations to the farmers for the optimum and economic use of fertilizers and better soil management practices to increase agricultural production in their farm. The present study was conducted to analyze the adoption of soil testing and Soil Health Cards for fertilizer management conducted by Krishi Vigyan Kendra (KVK), Tirur, Tiruvallur district. The data revealed that the number of conduct of awareness and training programmes on soil health management and soil samples analysed (30 nos. to 240 nos.) at KVK Tirur increased from 2012 to 2018. Results indicated that highest percentage of beneficiaries belonged to the middle age group of 36-55 years (48.75%) followed old age (37%).  Most of the farmers were practicing agriculture in Semi Medium (28%) followed by medium land holdings (24%) among the SHC beneficiaries and small (35%) and Marginal land holdings (30%) among non-SHC beneficiaries. It was observed that medium level of knowledge was obtained (48%) by SHC beneficiaries followed by high level (20%) whereas 60% of non-beneficiary was having low level of knowledge on SHC. On an average majority of the SHC beneficiary were lying in the medium adoption level (43%) followed by high adoption category (21%). Reason behind the partial adoption and no adoption might be due to their unawareness on the benefits of optimum fertilizer application. Comparative analysis between adopted beneficiaries and SHC non-beneficiaries on crop productivity in paddy, Greengram Blackgram and groundnut indicated 11.66%, 16.12%, 8.67 and 15.10% increase in productivity over non-beneficiaries.