PERCEPTION ABOUT LAND DEGRADATION; AND IMPACT OF ADOPTION OF SUSTAINABLE LAND MANAGEMENT PRACTICES ON SMALLHOLDER FARMERS’ CROP PRODUCTION AND INCOME IN WEST WOLLEGA ZONE, OROMIA REGION, ETHIOPIA

Abstract

The adoption of sustainable land management practices (SLMP) is pivotal to handling land degradation and ensuring the sustainable use of limited land resources. Despite decades of research and development efforts, land degradation remains a serious environmental problem in many parts of the world. Farmers in Ethiopia and other Sub-Saharan African countries employ a variety of agricultural land management (SLM) practices to mitigate the negative impacts of land degradation. The SLM practices were intended to increase income and crop production further ensuring food security. Despite the widespread use of these (SLM) practices, little research has been done on how it affects crop production and related income, particularly linked to the viewpoints of interdependence between SLMP adoption and perceptions of land degradation. Ethiopia has long been regarded as a hotspot for land degradation one of the major threats to agricultural productivity, long-term food shortages, rural poverty, and the dimensional vulnerability of the people. So, it is crucial to understand farmers' perceptions of land degradation and determine the impacts of SLMP on crop production and income responses that differ in temporal and regional dimensions. Hence, the objectives of this study were to identify the determinants of farmers' perceptions of land degradation, their adoption of SLMP, the impacts of SLMP on crop production and income, and their interrelationships in Oromia, Ethiopia's west Wollega zone. The researcher used cross-sectional data collected from 426 farm household heads (225 participants and 201 nonparticipants), randomly selected from five districts of the west Wollega zone of Oromia Regional State, Ethiopia. Both descriptive statistics and econometric models were used to analyze the data. The descriptive result revealed that 58.4 %, 11.4%, 15.2%, 12.1%, and 2.91 %, of the sampled farm households, respectively, perceived negligible, minor, moderate, severe, and extreme degradation in the study area. The results also showed that the sampled household had a very low perception of land degradation in sampled districts of the study area: with 44.2%, 59.5%, 43.9%, 41%, and 51.2% of Najo, Boji, Gimbi, Mana-Sibu, and Ganji, respectively. An ordered logit was used to identify factors influencing households' perception of land degradation. The results confirmed that household education level, household size, total farmland size, experience, extension contact, access to NGOs, farmland slop type, and off/non-farm participation affected households' perception of land degradation in the study area. As a trivariate probit model shows, the likelihood that framers in the study area would choose fertilizer, area closure, SWC, crop rotation, and compost, respectively, was 37.2%, 35.3%, 40.5%, 38.2%, and 38.5%. The simulated maximum likelihood predicted joint probability of success or failure of the five SLMPs from the MVP model has shown 23% and 49.6% of the joint probability of success and failure of all SLMPs by the households in the study area. A multivariate (trivariate) probit model's findings also showed that cooperative member, off-farm participation, model farmer contact, perception of land degradation, the perceived cost of inputs, credit access, farming experiences, livestock holding, farm slopes, access to information, and the NGOS interventions had a significant positive influence on the SLMP participation decisions, while household age had a negative impact. The outcome of the impact analysis using PSM demonstrates that participation in the SLMP boosts household income and crop production while lowering land degradation risks for participant households in the study area. The significance of Breusch- Pagan's test of independence and the correlation of seemingly unrelated error factors in a trivalent. probit regression model revealed strong links between farmers' perceptions of farmland degradation, SLMP decisions, and SLMP impacts on crop and income improvement. The interdependence relationships in the study area have been positively affected by household education, access to information, total farmland size, cooperative members, farmland slop, the NGOs’ interventions, and access to irrigation, while negatively affected by age, the distance of farmland from household residence and distance to the closest market. Therefore, the study suggests that policymakers and local development experts should improve farmers' understanding of land degradation by addressing the various factors that influence farmers' perceptions of land degradation, which are distinct significantly among farm households. Moreover, the study recommended that the regional and local governments should design various specific programs to resolve the constraints for scaling up policymakers' focus on SLMP campaigning. This can be addressed by expanding the use of SLM practices by supporting more sources of income, promoting the use of labor-saving technologies, encouraging the establishment of local irrigation systems, strengthening farmers' cooperative groups, raising farmers' literacy levels, encouraging soil conservation methods, expanding the scope of rural microfinance intuition services, and establishing local information provision center in the study area