THE USE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY PRACTICES BY CATFISH FARMERS IN IKPOBA-OKHA LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA

ABSTRACT

The study was carried out to determine the use of environmental sustainability practices by catfish farmers in Ikpoba-okha local government area of Edo state, Nigeria. The specific objectives were to examine the socioeconomic characteristics of catfish farmers in the area, determine farmers’ level of awareness of environmental sustainability practices, identify the environmental sustainability practices carried out by the fish farmers, examine farmers attitude towards environmental sustainability, understand the challenges faced by the catfish farmers in implementing environmental sustainability practices in the study area. A total of 50 respondents were selected using a simple random sampling technique, whose data was collected using a well-structured questionnaire. The findings revealed that majority of catfish farmers in the study were female (58.0%), within the age range of 41-50 (36.0%), with 60.0% of respondent having BSC/HND educational qualification, and most of the respondents having a farming experience above 5 years. The findings of the study indicated that farmers had positive attitude towards environmental sustainability and were aware of practices like proper water requirement (100%), water efficiency (100%) and feed monitoring(100%), with water efficiency (M = 4.18) being the highest level of practice carried out by the farmers in the study area. The major challenge faced by catfish farmers was not enough information about the environmental sustainable practices. The result from Pearson’s correlation showed that the level of education had a negative relationship (r= -0.363 , p<005)with the level of practices, the major constraint restricting catfish farmers in the study area from these practices is the farmer’s education and awareness (M = 2.20).