Assessment of Cell Phone for Extension Services Delivery to Small-Scale Farmers and Prospects to Sustainable Agricultural Production in Kwara State, Nigeria

Kwara State University, Malete, empowered 150 crop farmers with cell phone to receive and search for agricultural messages, marking the beginning of electronic (e-)-extension services, to complement insufficient extension agents to increase domestic food supply on sustainable basis. It is desirable to assess the influence of this initiative on farmers’ level of digital literacy, productivity, constraints of messaging and determine prospects of e-extension for sustainable agricultural production in Kwara state. Two local government areas (LGAs), Moro, and Asa were purposively selected, followed by simple random selection of 60 farmers each with and without cell phone, amounted to 120 farmers per LGA totalled 240 farmers used as respondents. Interview schedule was used to elicit data from respondents and analysed by frequency table and t-test statistics. Findings showed that Findings showed that the average age of respondents was 43.16 years. In addition, 55.8% and 51.6% of farmers with cell phone could read and write in English language, respectively. Majority (74.12%) of farmers with cell phones had increased level of digital literacy, accessed information through internet. Furthermore, 69.2% indicated that the information accessed through the cell phone was timely whereas 65.8% reported drastic reduction on reliance of extension agents for information. Most (76.6%) of the respondents recorded increases in farm yield due to timely application of agricultural practices. The t-test statistics indicated a significant difference between farm size of farmers with and without cell phones (t = 3.513, P <0.05), indicating prospects for e-extension and agricultural production on sustainable basis. Constraints include electricity outage, poor feedback mechanism, network failure, and inadequate content development. It was concluded that the University should upgrade its extension laboratory to a better innovative digital centre for farmers’ training and information dissemination to sustain and increase farm yield on sustainable basis.