Vol. 9, Special Issue 9 (2020)

Author(s):
J Mishra, BC Das, P Swain and K Shweta

Abstract:
Backyard poultry farming plays a very important role in tribal areas in providing nutritional support, employment opportunities, improving rural income besides meeting consumer demands. Inspite of its huge contribution to rural livelihood not much interest has been shown by the farmers to scale up the production process. This study is an effort to explore the variability in the socio-economic characteristics of the tribal farmers which is contributing to the backyard poultry production system in the rural areas. Koraput district of Odisha was selected purposively for the study and 160 tribal poultry farmers were selected randomly form eight randomly selected villages. The findings revealed that majority (44.38%) of the tribal poultry farmers belonged to middle age group and 49.38% of them had of primary level of education. 82.5% of the respondents owned semi-pucca house and 60.62 % of the tribal farmers had in possession of less than eight animals besides poultry. Whereas, 61.25 % of the tribal farmers posses less than equal to 28 numbers of indigenous poultry. But, 90.62% of the farmers reported that the backyard poultry was their secondary occupation. Analysis of data revealed that 30% of the respondents had land holding of less than 1 acre and only 21.25% of the respondents had annual income of above one lakh rupees.