Knowledge of Farmers about Organic Dairy Farming Practices: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Interest in organic crop and livestock farming have remerged in recent past given the increasing adverse environmental, social and economical impacts of modern agriculture. But unlike organic crop farming the concept and practice of organic dairy farming is relatively new. Uttarakhand, one of the leading states in organic farming in India, have a predominance of mostly traditional integrated crop livestock farming closed to organic system along with relatively unpolluted ecosystem. The state also has a vast number of certified organic farmers supported by well-developed organizational structure thus also offered good prospect for organic dairy farming. Thus, the study was designed to analyze the extent of knowledge about organic dairy animal rearing among those certified organic farmers as well as non-organic farmers in vicinities. It was found that for most of the standard organic dairy farming practices organic farmers in plain regions exhibited better understanding with an average knowledge score of 48.97 per cent followed by organic farmers in hilly regions (43.46 %) though the difference in knowledge level among them was not significantly different as confirmed by Kruskal-Wallis test. In case of non-organic farmers knowledge level was much lower but not nil in both plain and hill.  It was found that education, farming system, extension agency contact, gender, herd size, use of locally available non-technical sources, social participation, management orientation and economic motivation was the major contributory factors which explains the variation in knowledge level of farmers with a contribution of 73.80 per cent of variances (R²= .738) in knowledge score. Education farming system, extension agency contact; locally available non-technical sources utilization, gender, economic motivation, risk orientation and mass media utilization had substantial direct effect on knowledge level as derived from path analysis.