Challenges of Agroforestry Systems’ Adoption by Farmers in the North Central Zone of Nigeria

AbstractThe challenges of agroforestry systems’ adoption by farmers in the North central zone of Nigeria, was carried out to address the following objectives; find out the perception of farmers on agroforestry technologies, identify the adoption level and ascertain why farmers discontinue agroforestry adoption.. Data were collected from 722 agroforestry farmers out of 782 sets of questionnaire that were distributed. Frequency and percentages were used to describe socioeconomic characteristics of the respondents. Meanscore and sigma score were used to anlayse perception of farmers, adoption levels and comparison between vegetal cover and selected climatic variables. More that 75 percent of the respondents had little or no formal education. More than sixty percent of the respondents had farm size between 1.1 to 3 hectares. Adoption of the technology increased between 2008 and 2010 but decreased as it approached 2013. Inadequate knowledge of agroforestry mean score (3.71) and lack of market (meanscore, (3.55) made many farmers to discontinue adoption. The paper stressed the establishment of Small-scale industries that will utilize the fruits from the trees planted as raw materials to attract better market, scale up adoption of more fruit trees among farmers.