Analyses of factors affecting the adoption of major Agro-forestry systems in the high altitude zone of Andhra Pradesh

Abstract

The research study was conducted to analyse the factors affecting the adoption of major agro forestry systems in the high altitude zone of Andhra Pradesh. The high altitude zone of Andhra Pradesh is having the major agro forestry systems viz., cashew + pulses, mango + turmeric, sliver oak + pepper + coffee, eucalyptus, jafra, rubber systems spread over in an area of 12,28,504 ha in the state. Besides analyzing the interrelationships among the factors, the factor affecting the adoption of agro forestry systems were also identified. A total sample of 335 farmers from different districts in high altitude zone of Andhra Pradesh were selected to analyze the identified factors affecting the adoption of six major agro forestry systems. The data pertains to the years 2020-2022. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) of >0.5 was computed to test the sampling adequacy. Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity (Significant at 0.001) was conducted to test whether the correlation between the variables was sufficiently large for factor analysis and correlation matrix was computed to confirm the inter-item correlation. The principal component factor analysis was used for the factor extraction and varimax rotation technique was used for factor rotation. The results showed that six factors with eigen values greater than 1 were successfully constructed. The six factors accounted for 60.28% of the total variance in the dataset and were assigned as the factors influencing the agro forestry systems in Andhra Pradesh. The communalities results ranging from 0.47 to 0.72 depicted that the 6 factor model was adequate.