Vol. 8, Issue 11 (2019)

Author(s):
Santhoshini Chinta, CH Satyanarayana, M Srinivasa Reddy, T Raghunandan and DBV Ramana

Abstract:
Six mandals from each district of Mahabubnagar and Nalgonda of southern telangana zone were selected purposively and two villages from each mandal were selected by simple random sampling technique. Based on the available dairy farmers’ population in the selected villages, 10 percent of the sample size (254 respondents) from 24 villages in 12 mandals of Southern Telangana zone was selected for the study. Majority (47.64%) of the respondents belonged to middle age group of 36-50 years, illiterates (40.15%), medium family size with 4-6 members (68.5%), more than three-fourth of the farmers (77.16%) belonged to medium herd size, majority (58.66%) of the respondents possessed 4-9 dairy animals. The farm size of the respondents revealed that 47.25 percent were small farmers, nearly cent percent (98.82%) of farmers practiced integrated farming system, with most of them (66.92%) practiced crop plus dairy farming and 1.18 percent had only dairy. Based on total income generated from various sources, majority of the respondents (67.72%) were had medium income category with 75,000 – 1, 50,000 and income generated from dairy animals showed that majority of the farmers (52.76%) were under medium income category of Rs.40,000 to Rs.80,000. Majority (45.28%) of the dairy farmers had medium experience of 12-24 years, medium information seeking behaviour (74.41%), among the formal sources majority (47.24%) of the dairy farmers were consulting the veterinarian occasionally for information, where as among the informal sources all the respondents were consulting the family members frequently. Television was mostly (84.65%) assessed among the mass media sources, followed by mobile phones (29.53%) by the dairy farmers in southern telangana zone.