Assessment of post-harvest handling technologies used by groundnut farmers in Serere/Olio sub-county, Serere district

Abstract

Majority of the farmers used traditional post-harvest handling technologies such as uprooting, hand hoe, carrying on head, ox-cart, bare ground, cow dung smeared ground and granaries and intermediate technologies like bicycle, old sacks, tarpaulins and ordinary sacks. The adoption of improved post-harvest handling technologies such as motorcycle, vehicle, manual shellers, electric shellers and PICS bags is still low among the farmers. Therefore, the study analyzed the factors which influenced the adoption of these technologies. This is vital in promoting better methods that integrate socio-economic factors in mitigating post-harvest losses and help farmers embrace better post-harvest handling technologies. Simple random sampling technique was used to select 73 respondents from the three parishes of Akoboi, Okulonyo and Osugoro in Serere/Olio sub-county. These were interviewed with the aid of well-structured questionnaires. Stata version 15 was used to analyze data using descriptive statistics and probit regression model. A few farmers who used proper post-harvest handling technologies incurred average costs of about UGX 119,268 for tarpaulins, 58,333 for PICs bags and 6,090 for electric shellers. Most of the traditional post-harvest handling were used by farmers at a zero cost. Results from the probit model revealed that age, education level, distance from the research station (NaSARRI), experience in groundnut production, land area under groundnut production, use of multiple technologies, household monthly income, access to credit and access to extension services influenced the adoption of post-harvest handling technologies. This study recommends for recruitment of more extension workers and promotion of development programs in the rural areas which help to enhance the household income of farmers. This will improve the adoption levels of improved technologies.