Abstract
In countries like Ethiopia where climate change imposed recurrent droughts cause crop failure and death of livestock, identifying and adopting climate smart agricultural practices can be considered as a panacea. In line with this the agricultural growth program has been implementing varies climate smart agricultural technologies in different parts of Ethiopia and yet there is little information on their contribution to income and food self-sufficiency and factors affecting their adoption.
This study was initiated with main objective to assess the contribution of agricultural growth program implemented agricultural practices to climate smart agriculture and their determinants in Efratana gidm District of North Shewa, Ethiopia by employing cross-sectional data collection tools. A multi-stage purposive and stratified random sampling technique was used and survey was conducted with a total of 204 respondents categorized into adopters (139) and non-adopters (65). The result indicated that adopters had significantly larger farm size (1.19 ha) and herd size (3.19 TLU) compared to 0.78 ha and 1.8 TLU respectively for non- adopters. Adopters also had better access to credit and extension services than non-adopters. A total of 11 climate smart practices were adopted and of the total 6 were nutrient smart and 3 carbon smart technologies. Adoptions of these technologies helped adopters to produce significantly larger crop yield and obtain significantly higher income (ETB 51,347.3) than non-adopters (ETB 32,160.1). The food self-sufficiency ratio for adopters were 2.18 while 1.75 for non-adopters. Adoption of climate-smart agricultural practices were significantly positively influenced by level of education, credit and extension services, labour availability, farm and herd size while significantly negatively influenced by distance of the farm field from homestead. Further research should be undertaken on farmers’ knowledge and their existing experience about prioritization of agricultural practices.
Keywords: Adoption, climate smart, factors, food self-sufficiency, income
