ABSTRACT
The study was centered on the effectiveness of extension teaching methods among catfish marketers in Egor Local Government Area of Edo State, Nigeria. The socioeconomic characteristics was analyzed using descriptive statistics, frequency of access to information channels of improved catfish marketing methods was achieved using a 5 point liked scale.
The results from the study showed that most (36.7%) of the respondents were found to be within the age bracket of 32 – 39 years. The result also showed that the females were 90.0% and 85.0% were married. The result further showed that majority of the catfish farmers were aware of the various forms of value addition through forms, location, time, information, and ownership. The result shows that catfish markers only accessed information from catfish marketers/farmers very often (95.0%) while they sometimes accessed information from other farmers and never accessed information from family members, extension agents, newspaper, magazines and bulletins, radio, television, internet and cooperative societies. The finding from the study also revealed that the constraints in the study study area were not serious using a benchmark of 3.0 while the finding revealed that there was a significant relationship (r = 0.001, p ≤ 0.01) between respondents use of information channels and their intensity of performing catfish marketing functions. There was also a significant relationship between respondents’ socio-economic characteristics and their adoption intensity of improved catfish marketing technologies.
Based on the findings, it was recommended that adequate training must be given to the extension agents as regards the proper manipulations of extension teaching methods to bring out the desired result, extension agents must have adequate knowledge of the characteristics of each of the extension teaching methods as well as know the characteristics of the respondents. appropriate extension teaching methods must be used to pass across appropriate improved information technologies given the nature of the teaching to disseminate and stakeholders responsible for extension teaching methods should double efforts to carry out their function of information generation and delivery to catfish marketers.
