Importance Of Information And Communication Technology In Rice Production Among Small Scale Farmers In Morogoro Region, Tanzania

ABSTRACT

In many sub-Saharan African countries including Tanzania, farmers face hardship to access better agricultural information. Consequently farmers lack adequate knowledge on farm management skills like correct land preparation, timely planting, pest and diseases and their control, timely weed control to bypass the critical period of weed competition, and low price of their product since they depend mostly to get information from extension officers and middlemen. But number of extension officers does not match with number of farmers who are in need of agricultural services and middlemen tend to give farmers low price and sell at high price to the trader for their own advantage hence farmers incur loss. Though the rapid development in ICTs have a huge potential to address challenges facing small scale farmers in accessing agricultural information and hence farm profitability, empirical evidence to that effect is lacking in Morogoro Region . Therefore the present study aims at bridging that knowledge gap. The present study used descriptive statistics, Probit model and Gross margin analysis to analyze the data from a randomly selected sample of 399 rice farmers from four districts of Morogoro region. The descriptive results show that 57.3% of these farmers were adopters of ICT’s while 42.7% being non-adopters, whereby among the adopters most farmers used mobile phones and radios to access information on agronomy advice and weather forecast compared to market information. Television was used by few farmers to access weather forecast information.Probit analysis shows that the use of ICT’s in communicating agriculture information is influenced by age, gender, education level, total farm size, awareness of ICT’s and use of advanced technology during production were. Gross margin analysis results shows that the adopters of ICT’s had a high gross margin compared to non- adopters at 0.05 level of significant. Through these results it is seen that still many of the rice farmers in Morogoro have not adopted the use of these ICT tools in assessing the agricultural information hence most of these farmers end up obtaining low yields and among the users of ICT many of them access very limited information with limited ICT tools. Therefore the Government should encourage policies that will emphasize farmers using the ICT tools by ensuring maximum support from other stakeholders’ example from mobile service provider companies, ensuring affordable prices of these ICT tools and prices of acquiring information so as to support rice farmers in ensuring that they obtain higher yields that will boost the sector in the country.