Abstract
The study aimed at determining farmers' attitude towards Integrated Crop Management (ICM) for sustainable vegetable production and to explore factors responsible for attitude formation of farmers towards ICM. Data were collected from randomly selected 200 ICM club members during February to June 2015 through personal interview, focus group discussion, scored causal diagrams, key informant interview and case study of Malandah upazila under Jamalpur district. The selected sixteen characteristics of the farmers were considered as the independent variables while their attitude of ICM constituted the dependent variable. The attitude score of the farmers towards ICM ranged from 73 to 160 against a possible range of 36 to 180, with an average of 119.46. The highest proportion (75.50) of the respondents had favourable attitude, 13.00 percent neutral attitude and only 11.50 had unfavourable attitude. The average attitude score regarding seed management, nutrient management, water management, pest management, post-harvest technology and sustainability aspects were 21.08, 18.27, 19.36, 22.05, 18.60 and 20.11 respectively, against the possible score of 6 to 30 for each aspect. Among the 16 characteristics of the farmers, 13 characteristics namely age, year of schooling, annual household income, farming experience, training exposure, knowledge on ICM, extension media contact, decision making ability, organizational participation, risk orientation, innovativeness, perception of commercial agriculture, awareness of climate change issues on agriculture were significantly correlated with their attitude towards ICM for sustainable vegetable production. Among these, only five characteristics of the farmers namely: years of schooling, knowledge on ICM, training exposure, extension media contact and decision making ability had significant contribution and jointly explained 61.30 percent of variation to the farmers' attitude towards ICM. Path analysis showed that the year of schooling had highest direct positive effect while decision making ability of the farmers had highest total indirect effect. ICM vegetables have no extra benefit, lack of need based training, less availability of ICM materials, lack of participatory and co-operative ICM approach, improper management practice of ICM, weakness of government policy and bound to sell vegetable in local market at low price were among the major constraints confronted by the farmers for adopting ICM practices in their farming. However, ensuring premium price of ICM products, need based quality training, easy availability of ICM materials, participatory and co-operative ICM approach, proper management practice of ICM, proper government policy, strong ICM farmers' association and strengthening ICM club activities, availability of information source and publicity through different mass media and sustainable good marketing channel could help in coming out of the problem.