Adoption of Modern Agricultural Technologies in Urban Agriculture: A Case Study in Mekelle City-Vegetable Growers

Urban agriculture is an important strategy in supplying for every growing urban population affordable food and adding to their nutrients. Moreover, producing vegetable plays a significant role in contributing to the welfare of particularly poor urban residents. Vegetables are the main source of nutrients and their socio-economic importance is quite clear to the urban citizens. Consequently, production and productivity of vegetable in the urban areas should be improved. This improvement will solely be complete if modern agricultural technologies are utilized; among the most modern technologies fertilizer and pesticide take priority because of their contribution to soil fertility and hence output. In this study, the determinants of the likelihood of fertilizer and pesticide adoption decision, the intensity of use of fertilizer and volume of use of pesticide on vegetable production and whether or not income difference has come between the adopters and non-adopters of the growers in Mekelle city(the study area) were investigated. The heckman two-satage model, and OLS, which consists of a sample of 204 households, was used in the analysis. The study used both primary and secondary data for analysis. Probit regression model was employed to spot factors that determine adoption decision of the agricultural input chemical technologies like fertilizer and pesticide and heckman two-stage model was used to check financial gain difference between the adopters and non-adopters regarding to those technology adoptions. Additionally, the intensity of use of fertilizer and volume use of pesticide were investigated by employing the OLS (linear regression) model. Therefore, this study intends not solely to contribute one thing in filling the gap of data on urban agriculture by taking one part of urban agriculture that is technology adoption within vegetable production, but also aims to attract attention to the comparatively neglected area of urban agriculture. To this end, the study tried to spot the determinants that affected technology adoption decision and their intensity/volume of use in the city vegetable growers. It also tried to examine how technology adoption led to higher financial gain of the growers. Based on the result of this study, the factors that affect the likelihood of fertilizer, pesticide, and joint adoption, the intensity of use of fertilizer and volume of use of pesticide, and the income difference of the adopter and non-adopters were explained like age of household head, educational level of the household head, sex of the household head, household family size, farmer’s farming experience on vegetable cultivation, cost of fertilizer, farmer’s perception on fertilizer, soil fertility, closeness of farm land to homesteads, nearness of market to farm land, extension support, access to credit, farm size, sufficiency of irrigation water, off-farm activities, purpose of farming, total household income, cost of pesticide, and farmer’s attitude towards pesticide. This result has vital implication for the formulation of policies and programs targeted to promotion of chemical fertilizer and pesticide use in urban vegetable production mainly in the study area (Mekelle city) and other cities with similar ecological systems. Key words: Farm technology, adoption, intensity, heckman, Least Ordinary Square, Mekelle