Dikshya Poudel¹*, Soniya Bashyal¹ and Arvind Srivastava^2
1Faculty of Agriculture, Agriculture and Forestry University
²Department of Horticulture, Agriculture and Forestry University
*Corresponding author’s email: dikshyapoudel82@gmail.com, *ORCID iD: 0000-0002-5068-3044

Abstract

Ramechhap district is well known for the production of sweet oranges. Farmers are often reluctant to invest in orchard management which also accounts for low sweet orange production in the district. A survey study was conducted to assess the adoption of improved orchard management practices of sweet orange in Ramechhap district. The pre-tested semi-structured questionnaire was administered among randomly selected 100 Sweet orange growers of 6,7 and 8 wards of Ramechhap Municipality to obtain the primary source data and descriptive statistics was computed using Ms-Excel and SPSS. Based on total number of sweet orange trees, farmers were grouped as small and large holder farmers. Practices like pruning, Farm Yard Manure application, mulching and intercropping were highly adopted whereas chemical fertilizer application, micronutrient application, Bordeaux paste application and irrigation were least adopted by growers. Only large growers made application of micronutrients and chemical fertilizers. Average productivity was found to be 11.74 mt/ha for large farmers while it was 8.92 mt/ha for small growers. The adoption index was found to be higher for large farmers compared to small and the index was positively correlated with the productivity. Lack of technical knowhow about orchard management practices and high cost of input materials limited the adoption of management practices while high disease and pest infestation and lack of irrigation facilities were the major constraints of production among small and large growers. This research opens up the importance of timely adoption of orchard management practices for enhancing the production of sweet orange in the study area.