Assessment of Adoption of Digital Extension Services for Sustainable Agriculture by Farmers in Lagos State, Nigeria

Abstract

This study investigated the adoption of digital extension services by rural agricultural farmers for sustainable agriculture in Lagos State, Nigeria. The study was guided by two research objectives and questions. The study employed a descriptive survey research design and a multi-stage sampling technique to choose rural farmers as respondents from five farming communities in Epe LGA namely Oriba, Ejinrin, Ilaara, Araga, and Igboye. These communities were purposefully selected in the first stage in Epe Local Government, and 100 rural farmers (20 per village) were purposefully selected at random in the second stage according to the size of the farm communities. A well-structured 20-item questionnaire, using a 5-point Likert scale was used as instrument. Three experts from Lagos State University of Education's College of Vocational and Entrepreneurship Education provided face validity validations for the instrument. The internal consistency of the instrument was 0.99 using cronbach Alpha Model. The descriptive statistics of weighted mean was used to analyse the data. The findings revealed that there is a moderate adoption rate of digital extension services by rural farmers for sustainable agriculture in Lagos State. Findings also indicated that rural farmers strongly agreed that there are barriers such as erratic power supply, high cost of data, etc. that negatively affect the adoption of digital extension services for sustainable agriculture in Lagos State. The authors recommended expanding internet and electricity access in rural areas through public-private partnerships, implementing capacity-building initiatives for farm people and introducing subsidy programmes to increase smartphone ownership among rural farmers.