Analysis of climate-smart agricultural practices in maize production among smallholder farmers in eastern Uganda.

Abstract

Climate change remains a major threat to maize production and food security as well. The increasing temperatures, drought stress, disease and pest outbreak followed with variability in rainfall partners has had serious consequences on crop production in the region thus fostering a decline in production resulting into food insecurity. Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) is the way to turn around the situation to more resilience and higher agricultural productivity leading to improved food security status. Multistage sampling technique was employed in sampling 240 maize small holder farmers in the region. The Primary data was collected through face-to-face interviews using structured and open ended questioners to interview the respondents. With the application of principal component analysis, we clustered the CSA practices into 4 components: crop management, field management, and farm risk reduction and soil management practices. The CSA practices were grouped using a Principal component analysis (PCA) and a Regression analysis was used in analyzing the effect of CSA practices on maize yield. The factors that influence the demand for CSA practices were determined in a poison regression analysis, Multinomial Endogenous Switching Regression was employed in analysis. Multicollinearity and heteroskedasticity were conducted to the variables for socioeconomic, institutional, and climate related factors.

The results revealed that 14 individual CSA practices which were grouped into four components actively in use. The results indicated a strong positive correlation between the Maize yield and the CSA practices. The results also showed that demand for CSA practices was positively influenced by gender of the household head, household size, and participation in off-farm employment, farm size, group membership, and annual contacts with extension service agents, credit access and negatively influenced by age of the household head. A complete package with crop management, field management, farm risk reduction and specific soil management practices had the highest implication on maize production, food security and determine and propose the best adoption options for maize production. Farmers should be sensitized on the need to invest in farm productive assets in order to absorb the risks of climate change while also enabling them to benefit from use of CSAs which require these important assets. CSAs have the potential to alleviate food insecurity among smallholder farmers if used in combinations and to a larger extend. Keywords: Climate-smart agricultural practices, Food security, Climate change, Smallholder farmers, Multinomial endogenous switching regression analysis.