Socio-economic Characteristics and Access to Agricultural Information in Public Libraries among Smallholder Farmers in South-East Nigeria

Abstract

The main source of new information for smallholder farmers ought to be the public library. It is pertinent that new information on agricultural practices is deposited in such libraries as frequently as they are created. The broad objective of this study is to investigate the effect of socio-economic characteristics of smallholder farmers on access to agricultural information and the rating of public library services in South-East Nigeria. This becomes paramount given the volume of new agricultural information, low socio-economic characteristics of smallholder farmers and the expected role of public libraries as the main source of information for rural dwellers. A multistage sampling was adopted resulting to a sample size of 355. Structured questionnaire was used for data collection and data on some economic characteristics were presented using bar charts. The analysis was done using regression method, means and standard deviation. The predictability of frequency of access by socio-economic variables was very high (R2 = 87.2%) with the identified variables as age, gender, education, farmer experience, membership of farmer association, size of farmland, average annual income, and type of farming as significant (P < 0.05). The result shows the mean rating of public libraries in all the services by smallholder farmers as being poor.