Youth Involvement in Organic Production of Selected Arable Crops: Panacea to Increased Food Production in the Era of COVID-19 Pandemic in Osun State, Nigeria

Abstract

The study assessed the youth involvement in organic production of selected arable crops in Osun State, Nigeria. Purposive sampling technique was used to select three agro-ecological zones; Iwo, Osogbo and Ife/Ijesa. A random sampling procedure was used to select two communities from two local government areas in each agro-ecological zone. Finally, snowball sampling procedure was used to select 50 youth from each community making a total of 600 respondents for the study. A well-structured interview schedule was used to collect quantitative data. The data collected were summarised with percentages, means and standard deviation while chi-square and correlation analysis were used to draw inferences.

Resultsshow that there was significant association between the level of involvement and sex (χ²= 22.412, P ≤ 0.01), marital status (χ² = 18.900, P ≤ 0.01) and cosmopoliteness (χ² = 41.214, P ≤ 0.01) of the respondents. Also, the results of Correlation show that household size (r = -0.209, p ≤ 0.05) and years of formal education (r = -0.200, p ≤ 0.05) had significant but negative relationship with the involvement while years of farming experience (r = 0.263) had positive and significant relationship with the involvement of youth at p≤ 0.01.

The study concluded that the youth had a moderate (49.1%) level of involvement in organic production of selected arable crops in the study area.