Adoption behaviour of dairy farmers in relation to green fodder cultivation in a cooperative farming system

This study was carried out at purposively selected Gaighata and Bagdah blocks of the North-24-Parganas District, West Bengal, India. From each of the purposively selected two blocks, 25 per cent of the villagelevel- milk cooperative societies were selected randomly. Thus, 10 village-level milk cooperative societies (25%) from Gaighata Block and 20 (25.64%) from Bagdah Block were randomly selected. From each of the selected milk cooperative societies, four dairy farmers were randomly selected, out of which both Member Cooperative Society (MCS) and Non-member Cooperative Society (NMCS) were two. Thus, 60 MCS and 60 NMCS (total of 120 respondents) were selected, which constituted the sample of this study. The direct face-to-face interview method with structured schedule was followed for data collection. The study showed that adoption of green fodder cultivation was highly correlated with all the socio-psychological variables in MCS and NMCS. It also showed that all the communication variables had significant correlation with adoption of green fodder cultivation in MCS and NMCS, excepting personal cosmopolite and personal localite in MCS. Among socio-economic variables, age had significant negative correlation with adoption of green fodder cultivation in MCS. On Path analysis, knowledge about green fodder feeding in MCS, concentrate feeding, and deworming in NMCS came out to be the key variables that directly and indirectly influenced the adoption of green fodder cultivation.