Assessment of rainfall and temperature as climate variability indicators and their impact on maize (zea mays l.) yield in the Ejura Sekyedumase District: farmers' perception, meteorological data.
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Date
2008-08-23
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Abstract
This study assessed the perception of farmers in the Ejura Sekyedumase District on Climate variability and how it has affected agriculture from 1993 to 2006. Opinions from 150 respondents selected through a stratified simple random sampling were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Meteorological data was analyzed using INSTAT PLUS v3.33 e whilst grain yield and perception data were analyzed using and Statistical Package for Social Scientist (SPSS) and the results showed that most of the farmers were within the age groups of 31-40 years (34.7%) and 41-50 (30.0%) and most (84.0%) fanners had had formal education.
Except for temperature changes which had been noticed by only 9 -14% of the farmers, over 75% had noticed changes in rainfall and drought. Lack of access to jvater was the main factor inhibiting adapting to other methods of watering crops. Lack of access to credit, information on weather and alternative farming practices were the others. Analysis of the areas meteorological data did not strongly support the farmers' perception. The suitable planting time from the analysis of precipitation data in the area is 8th April for the major season and 31st August for the minor season. The mean dates for end of rains were 10th July and 2nd November for the major and minor seasons respectively. Out of the considered meteorological elements, only annual precipitation was found to have considerable influence on the grain yield,
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A Thesis submitted to the Department of Theoretical and Applied Biology,
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science.