Adoption and communication behaviour of Tribal farmers with Respect to Rock Phosphate
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Date
1991
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Birsa Agricultural University, Ranchi
Abstract
Tribal farmers in general do not use phosphatic fertilizer due to economic reasons besides others like poor knowledge and mythical beliefs. Some of them, however, use fertilizer as it gives visual effect immediately while others do not use it at all.
The upland soil of Chotanagpur is acidic. The use of water soluble phosphatic fertilizer like super phosphate is found to be less effective in acid soils due to phosphate fixation. If phosphate fertilizer has to be made available to plants, method of preventing phosphate fixation like application of organic matters and liming have to be done,which will be prohibitive on economic consideration.
Therefore, the cheap alternative phosphatic fertilizer as Rock phosphate powder for acid soils, which can release slowly and also prevent phosphate fixation in the soil is generally recommended for the tribal farmers. The government, therefore, subsidized Rock phosphate up to 75 per cent for tribal farmers in the shape of incentive. The subsidies are being given to the farmers to speed up the rate of adoption of new technology. The strategy here was to facilitate the trial use which would follow the full scale adoption, still the farmers do not use cheap Rock phosphate for fertilizer to our expectation and consequently yield of tribal farmers is poor .