Farmers’ knowledge and practices on chickpea production and disease management in major chickpea growing areas of Ethiopia

We developed Semi-structured questionnaire and conduct
a survey to randomly selected farmers to asses’ their knowledge
and practices on chickpea production and pest management.
We found that, 93% of the respondent were
male-headed household with the mean age of 46 years. Most
of farmers (97%) get advisory services on integrated pest
management. Education status, reading label of pesticide,
use of personal protective shows significant and positive
association with fungicide utilization. Though the majority
(91%) of farmers do have chickpea disease problems, the
majority were unaware of its causal agents and about 67.4%
of the respondents suggest that moisture could be the reason
for wilting but few (15.4%) were responded that the
causal agent to be a pathogen. Chickpea disease management
needs full package of integrated disease management
approach and collaborating projects needs to revise their
strategy to include the pest management support services
together with breeding and extension programs.