Conservation agriculture in new alluvial agro-ecology: Differential perception and adoption

• Published in: Journal of rural studies 2021-12, Vol.88, p.14-27
• Main Authors: Chatterjee, Riti, Acharya, Sankar Kumar, Biswas, Amitava, Mandal, Anwesha, Biswas, Tufleuddin, Das, Srikanta, Mandal, Biswapati
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Agricultural conservation; Agricultural economics; Agriculture; Agroecology; Biodiversity; Change agents; Climate change; Climate change mitigation; Climate-smart; Conservation; Decision making; Dependent variables; Ecology; Energy; Energy conservation; Environmental aspects; Farmers; Farms; Food security; Households; Knowledge; Perception; Scarcity; Segmentation; Social factors; Social-ecology; Soil conservation; Water scarcity; Workshops
• ISSN: 0743-0167; 1873-1392
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jrurstud.2021.10.001

Conservation agriculture (CA) is shimmering up as a potential solution to food security, biodiversity, mitigating climate change effects on agriculture and water scarcity challenges. Adoption of CA found to be related not only ecological factors, but also depends on the characteristics of the adopter, their level of perception and the decision-making process. This paper examines the interactions and inter-relationship among climate change perception, energy perception, and level of knowledge on CA as dependent variables with a set of operating agro-economic, social-ecological, communication variables from new alluvial zone of West Bengal. Total of 65 farm households are surveyed using non-random snowballing sampling method. From the study it has found that farmers’ perception on energy, climate change perception, and knowledge on CA are interwoven with each other. As the farmers of the study region are in initial stage of adoption they need access to proper CA-related information and Upgradation of functional education through training, workshops, or demonstrations. Here are the points of interventions for successful on-farm adoption of CA. While land fragmentation and fuel cost are came up as two important predictors. •Successful adoption of conservation agriculture depends on the interaction between farm social-ecological factors.•Farmer's own perception drives adoption of conservation agriculture.•Optimization of irrigation and number of ploughing are two pre-requisites.•Access to proper information is important in knowledge stage of innovation-decision.