Impact of Trichoderma Enhanced Composting Technology on Farmers’ Livelihoods in Bangladesh

Abstract

Trichoderma is an environment friendly soil borne fungus that speeds up decomposition of organic materials into compost. Currently, many farmers in Bangladesh are using Tricho-compost to increase soil fertility and to get higher crop yield. A study was conducted with the purpose of determining: (i) the farmer’s livelihood improvement as a result of tricho-compost application in soil, (ii) the personal and socio-economic characteristics of the farmers’, and (iii) the contribution of socio-economic characteristics of farmers’ to their livelihood status. For the qualitative experiment, the rural farmers involved in tricho-composting were the population under the study. A total of 20 locations were purposively selected from 120 locations and 10 respondents from each of the location were randomly selected to make a sample size of 200. Livelihood status of the farmers was the dependent variable while personal and socio-economic characteristics of the farmers were the independent variables which included age, education, family size, farm size, annual income, extension media contact, cosmopoliteness, agricultural knowledge, innovativeness, housing condition, sanitation, livestock possession, household asset, receipt of loan and environmental awareness. These characteristics were measured using standard statistical scoring techniques. The regression coefficient of eight variables namely education, annual income, extension media contact, cosmopoliteness, agricultural knowledge, livestock possession, household assets and environmental awareness were statistically significant indicating that these variables had a significant contribution to the livelihood status of Trichoderma practicing farmers. The other seven variables had no significant contribution to the livelihoods of farmers. Tricho-composting has a lot of contribution in changing the livelihoods of the farmers.