Farmers' Adoption of Improved Soybean Varieties in Malawi: Assessing Factors Influencing Adoption of Improved Soybean Varieties in Lilongwe and Dowa Districts

Cultivation of improved varieties is one way of increasing productivity of many crops especially in developing countries where there is pressure of land due to high population growth. Adoption studies have proved to be helpful in giving the picture of the performance of technologies amongst users like farmers and in line with this the study was carried out to assess the factors that influence a farmer to adopt improved soybean varieties using cross-sectional data that was collected from 300 households by the Department of Agricultural Research Services (DARs) in 2009. The study used a Hurdle Poisson model in order to effectively assess the socio-economic and demographic characteristics that influence farmers to adopt improved soybean varieties. The results of the study show that amongst the household socio-economic characteristics that were included in the model, age of the household head and farm size were significant at 5 percent level of significance whilst access to information through extension agents and distance to the market were the institutional factors that significantly influence a farmer.