Introduction
There is a consensus among Nigerian policy makers, her development partners, and experts in Nigerian agriculture that the wealth of the country can substantially be derived from agricultural production. It is generally believed that the small scale farmer holds the key to the realization of this possibility. However, the average Nigerian small scale farmer is poor, non-literate, and lacks access to most basic social amenities, as well as improved varieties of inputs and modern farming implements. The consequence of these has been low production and productivity. Yet, the agricultural sub-sector of the economy accounts for 41.5% of the country‟s Gross Domestic Product (Olawunmi, 2007). This is in contrast to the -4.82% contribution of the oil sub-sector. The oil sub-sector accounts for over 95% of the nation‟s total revenue in 2006 (BusinessDay, 2007). The problem, according to Bello (2002), is that as many as 65% of the country‟s population are producing 41.5% of the GDP. This shows that the percentage of Nigerians engaged in agriculture is more than the world average of 45.7% (Aina, 1995). The implication of this is that the productivity of this sub-sector of the Nigerian economy is quite low. The consequence is that food production is not keeping pace with the country‟s population growth rate. While the annual rate of population growth is estimated at between 2.5 and 3%, that of good production is between 1 and 1.5%.
This is consistent with Munyua‟s (n.d.) findings that while agricultural yields in developing countries continue to decline despite technological innovations, their population continue to expand beyond food production capacities.The performance of Nigerian agriculture so far indicates that the farmers have neither used nor absorbed most of the technologies being introduced to them (Atande, 1999). This appears to be the case considering the findings of Yayock and Misari (1990) which showed that there existed a wide gap between farmers‟ improved technology yields and farmers‟ traditional technology yields. This scenario, the authors attributed to the gap between available agricultural information on improved practices and its use. Thus, in agricultural information use studies, it is usual to investigate the personal and social characteristics of farmers in order to understand their relative influence in the farmers‟ information use behaviours (Onu, 1991). First of all, information use is dependent on the capacity of the user to access information and later use it. This capacity is dependent on certain cultural, socio-economic, personal, political and geographical variables. It also includes the appropriateness of the information, the credibility of the information channel, and the information provider‟s characteristics.
