Vol. 9, Issue 4 (2020)

Author(s):
G Triveni, GRK Sharma, Ch. Satyanarayana, K Sarjan Rao and T Raghunandhan

Abstract:
Knowledge about modern dairy husbandry practices is pre-requisite for adoption of it, which ultimately improves the dairy production. To measure the farmers knowledge on dairy innovations a standardized knowledge test was developed in the present study. A total of 27 items were selected for the test and response analysis was done for each item. The sample size constituted 360 respondents from three districts i.e., Visakhapatnam, Krishna and Chittoor of the three regions of Andhra Pradesh respectively. The response analysis clearly indicated that, majority of farmers had knowledge on items like regular payments received through sale of milk (94%), drying of the pregnant animals 60 days before calving (91.4%), fixing of uniform and remunerative price for milk (88%), marketing of milk by an organized structure i.e., cooperatives (74.2%), feeding of area specific mineral mixture (74%) while large majority of dairy farmers possessed very poor (or) almost no knowledge on items like production of hydrophonic fodder (12%), composition of complete feed blocks (12.80%), utility of complete feed blocks (5.60%), Azolla as a supplement to concentrate feed (28%) etc. Results on overall level of knowledge revealed that, more than half (56.64%) of the respondents possessed medium followed by farmers with low (30.28%) and high (14.08%) level of knowledge respectively.