Sustainable Maize Crop Production in Owena Basin, Nigeria

To improve maize production, efforts must be doubled to expand the current extent of land suitability profiling. Lingering questions hinged on whether maize is presently grown on land that supports its optimal growth and if farmers’ knowledge of their farmland suitability informs their decision to cultivate improved maize varieties. However, attaining the level of food self-subsistence largely requires optimum land use and the adoption of innovative advancement to double farmers' yields. Unfortunately, land suitability profiling and farmers’ cultivation of Improved Maize Varieties (IMV) still require more attention in the scheme of initiatives to revitalize agriculture. Previous research addressed other crops rather than maize staples and assessed areas exclusive of the current study area. This paper used Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Multicriteria Analysis (MCA) to map out land areas suitable for maize cultivation and further used frequency, counts, and parametric estimator to data from 466 maize farmers to profile farmers who cultivated IMV, examine the effect of cultivating IMV and its determinants. Results showed the suitability of AHP for land evaluation, revealing the highly, moderately, marginally, and least suitable areas of land for maize cultivation occupying 5.09%, 56.53%, 37.47%, and 0.89% of the total land. The result also divulges the dominance of old respondents where the age of farmers who did not cultivate IMV ranged between 50 and 61 years while the age of respondents who cultivated IMV ranged between 52 and 72 years. A small-scale production pattern was observed as the area of land under cultivation varied between 1.9 and 2.67 acres for respondents who grew IMV and those who did not. The Potential Outcome mean (POmean) estimation for respondents who did not grow IMV was 8127.70kg and 11695.8 kg for respondents who cultivated IMV, and the size of land cultivated and access to extension services significantly (at P>|z|=0.000) contributed to the likelihood of farmers growing IMV. The study highlights the importance of harnessing the comparative advantage of land by cultivating the crop it best supports suggesting the need to embrace IMV cultivation and practices including but not limited to the cultivation of legumes to help maintain the soil integrity and further advocate for improved communication between farmers and agricultural services developers.