Up-scaling Innovative Practices to Optimize Teff Yield in Dry-land Areas, Northeast Amhara

Abstract

The pre-scaling up activity was conducted during July–November from 2020–2022 for three consecutive production years in the potential woredas of Wag-lasta area viz., Lasta, Dahana, Sekota and Sekota zuria, Ethiopia to transfer best performing teff technology to wider community through creating higher demand, on top of establishing sustainable multiplication and stakeholder linkage in the technology supply chain. The improved ‘Kora’ teff teff technology had been promoted for three consecutive production years involving 182 farmers who had 78 ha of clustered farmland. The required quantitative and qualitative data were collected and analysed using appropritate statistical tools.The performance of improved teff technology presented better performance, and thus had a 90% yield advantage over the local teff production practice in all locations. Among the participating farmers, 90.6% were highly interested to cultivate the new teff technology in the future. However, 72.8% of them described skill gap, complexity of the technology and being pessimist in new technology were the top three challenges experienced by farmers to apply the full technology package in Teff production. Most farmers and stakeholders who attended the field days were rapt, and promised to use the ‘Kora’ teff technology because it was very adaptive to their moisture deficit areas. The 43.6% of partaking farmers were also diffused 648 kg of improved ‘Kora’ teff seed for 108 fellow farmers. Therefore, we safely suggest the improved teff technology for further scaling up/out to similar locations through establishing sustainable seed multiplying cooperatives and stakeholder linkages.