SUSTAINABLE LAND MANAGEMENT FOR SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY IN OYO STATE, NIGERIA

Abstract

Sustainable agricultural production has been one of the major concerns of average Nigerian farmers over a long period of time. This study examined sustainable land management (SLM) practices for sustainable agricultural productivity and farmers’ sustainability using cross-sectional data and fuzzy logic to compute the composite farm level indicators. Data were collected from one hundred and seventy-six (176) farmers and Cobb Douglass production function, Tobit and fuzzy logic were used for the data analysis. The results revealed that the estimated parameters with Cobb Douglas production functions show that farm size used (r = 0.0572), years of farming experience (r = 0.172), farmers’ age (r = 0.240), income (r = 0.187) and farm management experience (r = -0.204) were significant (p<0.01)) respectively with the exception of source of irrigation (r = 0.048) with a different level of significance (p<0.10); Tobit regression shows that farm size (β= 0.0193, p<0.05), organic manure (β= 0.0347, p<0.10), fertilizer application (β= 0.1707, p<0.01), continuous cropping (β= -0.0494, p<0.05), pesticide application (β= 0.0807, p<0.01), income (β= 0.0094, p<0.05) and mode of cultivation (β= -0.0524, p<0.05) were the significant determinants of (SLM) while the fuzzy results revealed that total sustainable land use index (SLUI) was 0.276 indicating that farming was generally sustainable. Crop rotation (0.0085), use of herbicide (0.0079), land fallowing (0.0089), cover crop (0.0088) and industrial discharges (0.0089) are among contributive indicators which are used un-sustainably. It was therefore recommended, among other recommendations, that better agronomic practices should be encouraged and informal training through extension services should be conducted to educate farmers in order to have a sustainable increase in agricultural production in the study area.