Farmers’ knowledge and practices on chickpea production and disease management in major chickpea growing areas of Ethiopia

Abstract

We developed Semi-structured questionnaire and conduct a survey to randomly selected farmers to asses’ their knowledge and practices on chickpea production and pest management. We found that, 93% of the respondent were male-headed household with the mean age of 46 years. Most of farmers (97%) get advisory services on integrated pest management. Education status, reading label of pesticide, use of personal protective shows significant and positive association with fungicide utilization. Though the majority (91%) of farmers do have chickpea disease problems, the majority were unaware of its causal agents and about 67.4% of the respondents suggest that moisture could be the reason for wilting but few (15.4%) were responded that the causal agent to be a pathogen. Chickpea disease management needs full package of integrated disease management approach and collaborating projects needs to revise their strategy to include the pest management support services together with breeding and extension programs.