Dorothy Birungi Namuyiga^1,, Bernard Bashaasha¹

Increasing crop yields sustainably appears to be the only way out of the chronic decline in food availability and climate change effects in Sub-Saharan Africa, given the growing populations, shrinking farm sizes and degrading soils. The adoption of soil fertility technologies for example, conservation and inorganic fertilizer is still very low especially in Uganda. To date, no study has investigated factors that affect farmers’ adoption of these technologies in Eastern Uganda (Tororo and Kapchorwa districts) and western Kenya (Bungoma and Trans-Nzoia districts). The objective of the study was to analyze the factors that influence choice of adoption of Conservation Agriculture (CA) practices in maize-based production systems in the region. Ordered Probit model was employed to analyze determinants of adoption. The study used cross sectional data from 790 randomly sampled respondents. Fifty-seven percent of the respondents had adopted CA and had an average of 45 years, household size of seven members, average land owned was 3 acres and distance travelled to access input and output markets was 1.2 Km. Factors that affected the different levels of adoption included maize variety planted, use of hired labor and access to input credit. Policies that will lead to increased investment in better infrastructures, increased investment in provision of extension services and subsidy programs for agricultural inputs are recommended.

conversation agriculture, maize-base production systems, ordered probit model, Eastern Uganda and Western Kenya