Factors influencing the attitude of farmers of Tamil Nadu, India towards rabbit farming

D Puthira Prathap and K A Ponnusamy*

Sugarcane Breeding Institute (Indian Council of Agricultural Research), Coimbatore - 641 007. Tamil Nadu, India
puthira@yahoo.com
^*Department of Agricultural Extension and Rural Sociology, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore - 641 003. Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

This study explored the attitude of farmers towards rabbit farming and identified the factors associated with their attitude. An attitude scale consisting of 12 items was developed and administered to 35 rabbit farmers of Coimbatore district in Tamil Nadu, India.

The results revealed that a majority of the respondents were young, had studied up to high school, and had high level of innovativeness. Almost an equal number of respondents belonged to both middle and high-income groups, had both agriculture and other occupations and lived in both nuclear and joint families. When their attitude was assessed, majority belonged to the 'favourable' category and when the relationship between the independent variables and attitude of the respondents was studied, 'family- type' had a positive and significant relationship with attitude. Based on the findings, implications were drawn for the extension agencies involved in promotion of rabbit farming.

Key words: Attitude, factors, India, rabbit

Introduction

The Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) recipe to fight world hunger has rabbit as its key component. In developing countries such as India, where enormous meat shortages exist, the potential for rabbit production is greatest. Organized promotion of rabbit production in India took place during the late seventies by the import of rabbits from the UK and the former USSR, by the Central Sheep and Wool Research Institute of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. However, rabbit farming is still in its infancy in the country, in spite of its advantages such as, low investment and labour costs, easy handling, high growth and fecundity rate and its highly profitable products. Drawbacks such as poor marketing facilities, lack of adequate quality-parent stock and training facilities, superstitions and high production costs are possibly the major hurdles. Higher production costs, in particular, has been found to be a major limiting factor in developing countries (FAO 1987; Dalle 2002 ). The relatively slow growth of this promising enterprise, therefore, would lead us to believe that the farmers have an unfavourable attitude towards this enterprise. In such a case, the FAO's prediction of satisfying the world nourishing needs with rabbits, may not be applicable for India. Nevertheless, before arriving at such a conclusion, it would be appropriate to assess the attitude of farmers, since unfavourable attitude of farmers has been the major cause for non-adoption of several livestock technologies (Kaura 1967). Attitude has been described as an evaluative disposition towards some object or subject which has consequences for how a person will act toward the attitude object (Van den Ban and Hawkins 1986). A comprehensive study on the attitude-behaviour of farmers would assist the public and private extension systems involved in rabbit farming projects (Lukefahr and Cheeke 1990) in formulating appropriate strategies.

Tamil Nadu, one of the premier states of India, has a population of 66,878 rabbits with a density of 1 rabbit per sq.km according to the 17^th Provisional livestock census of 2004. This figure is definitely low given the fact that the state has several research and extension departments involved in promotion of rabbit farming.

Taking these points in to consideration, the need for learning about the attitude of farmers towards rabbit farming was felt. Hence, the present study was taken up with the following objectives.

• To study the profile of farmers.
  
  
• To ascertain their attitude towards rabbit farming and the factors associated with it.

Methodology

A psychological scale was developed following Equal Appearing Interval technique (Thurstone and Chave 1929 ) to measure the attitude of farmers towards rabbit farming (Prathap and Ponnusamy 2004). For this study, attitude was operationalized as the mental disposition of respondents about rabbit farming in varying degrees of favourableness or unfavourableness. Initially, 77 statements covering various aspects of rabbit rearing such as, physiology, economics, pathology, breeding, nutrition, marketability, superstitions, products from rabbits etc. were collected for scale construction. Among these, 47 statements were selected based on the guidelines for attitude scale construction [(Thurstone and Chave (1929); Likert (1932) and Edwards (1957)]. After subjecting these items to judges' rating, the final scale was arrived at. The final scale consisted of 12 statements (Table 1) which were arranged in random and administered to the respondents.

A 3-point continuum of 'Agree', 'Undecided' and 'disagree' were used as response categories. For administering the scale among the farmers, Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu, India, was purposively selected for the study. 35 rabbit farmers were selected at random and they formed the sample. The independent variables viz., age, education, occupation, annual income, family type and innovativeness and the dependent variable viz., attitude were selected based on discussion with extension and livestock experts and review of literature. The respondents rated each item (statement) in the scale, thus conveying their attitudes toward the object, i.e., rabbit farming, and these ratings were summed up to yield a score for the individual. Data were collected with the help of a structured interview schedule by personally interviewing the respondents. Statistical techniques employed in this study included, simple percentage, confidence interval, correlation coefficient and regression analysis.

Results and Discussion

Profile of the respondents

The demographic details of the farmers were collected and the distribution of respondents based on those details is presented in Table 2.

It could be inferred from the table that majority of the people involved in rabbit farming were young and had studied up to high school. The reasonably high level of literacy of the farmers may be because they belong to villages around Coimbatore, a city with excellent educational facilities. An analogous study conducted among rabbit farmers of Nigeria (Adisa and Oladoja 2003) also found the respondents to be predominantly young and literate. The distribution also shows that a majority of the respondents had agriculture and allied fields as their main occupation and most of the rich farmers had taken an interest in rabbit rearing. Both nuclear family and joint family system were nearly equally represented in the sample. High innovativeness was also observed. This may be due to the reason that rabbit rearing being a relatively new farming activity, only innovative farmers tend to venture.

Attitude of farmers

The respondents were classified based on their attitude scores and the results are presented in table 3.

The results revealed that majority of the respondents possessed favourable attitude towards rabbit rearing. Contrary to the popular opinion prevailing in the country, the results go on to show that the farmers have a positive attitude towards rabbit farming which may be because the respondents were convinced of the benefits of rabbit rearing. The maximum score was 33 and the minimum score was 24. However, since the highly favourable category consists of only 25.71 per cent of the respondents, it may also be assumed that the farmers are still not fully convinced of all aspects of rabbit rearing and that they do have apprehensions on its advantages.

Factors influencing the attitude of farmers towards rabbit farming

Studying the relationship between the characteristics of the respondents and their attitude was felt necessary for identifying the factors responsible for their relationship and simple correlation coefficient and multiple regression analysis were employed to assess the relationship. The results pertaining to this are presented in table 4.

The results reveal that the six variables taken together could explain for around 48 per cent (R² value being 0.488) of variation in the dependent variable, attitude. Among the six variables, only 'family type' had a positive and significant relationship with attitude. All other variables viz., age, education, occupation, annual income and innovativeness did not show any relationship with the dependent variable. In a similar study conducted by Ganpat and Bholasingh in 1999, it was found that education was positively associated with attitude towards farming, while age was not significantly associated. The results would indicate that farmers who have joint families with more members tend to have a favourable attitude towards rabbit rearing. Though rabbit rearing needs meticulous care and management, experts feel that it can be managed by family labour alone and this might have resulted in this significant relationship. Those farmers with joint families might have been convinced that rabbitries can be managed with family labour alone. Similarly, Kulkarni (1973) and Ghosh et al (2005) had reported that family type was significantly associated with the adoption of livestock production technologies. Contrary to these findings, household size did not influence the adoption of improved rabbit management practices according to Adisa and Oladoja (2003).

Conclusion

The results of the study showed that the farmers had a high level of favourableness towards rabbit farming and that the attitude of the farmers differed based on their 'family-type'. Based on the findings of the study the following implications were drawn.

• Since the farmers were young and literate, improved rabbit production technologies could be disseminated through print media and the farmers can be taken on study tours and excursion trips to other states of India for gaining a hands-on experience on successful rabbit production.
  
  
• Since farmers have a favourable attitude towards rabbit farming, research stations could conduct on-farm trials on rabbit farming technologies in the farmer's fields or can even encourage the farmers to conduct participatory researches so that the participating farmers as well as the fellow-farmers gain in confidence (Prathap et al 2003).
  
  
• Since the farmers are highly innovative, they can be taught about effectively utilizing various products from rabbits such as skin, meat, manure and fur.
  
  
• Since people living in joint families had a positive attitude towards rabbit rearing, it can be assumed that they had less labour constraints in maintaining their rabbitries. Hence, farmers living in joint families could be identified and advised to take up rabbit rearing, as they can be convinced that they could manage with family labour.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Dr.R.K.Theodore, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Dr.K.Sivakumar, Tamil Nadu Veterinary and Animal Sciences University and Dr.A.S.Rajendiran, Central Sheep and Wool Research Institute, for their kind help during the conduct of the study.

References

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Received 20 February 2006; Accepted 21 April 2006; Published 11 May 2006

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