ABSTRACT:The study assessed factors that influence students '

Smallholder farmers in rural Nigeria face farm labour shortages and the need to find ways of dealing with this problem is therefore apt for food security and socioeconomic improvement. In an attempt to deal with this problem, Nigerians rural farmers constitute themselves into farmers' labour groups in other to meet their farm and non-farm labour needs. Apart from supplying farm and non-farm labour, farmers' organizations can also bring about farmer-tofarmer extension service to members and non-members. Farmers' labour groups in eastern Kogi State adopt this extension strategy to share ideas, network with other farmers within the social system and develop managerial capability to handle their farm problems. A total of 160 farmers' labour groups were identified by the researchers and all the labour groups were purposively selected. And from each of the identified farmers' labour groups, the heads of each group were selected, thereby giving rise to 160 respondents for the study. Structured interview schedule was administered on the respondents. Data collected was presented using frequency distribution, percentage and mean statistics. Researchers' findings revealed that, joint-problem solving (M =2.8), increased in farmers' managerial ability (M =2.7), promotion of knowledge-sharing (M= 2.5), and improved farmer-to-farmer networking (M =2.4) were some of the extension services rendered by farmers' labour groups to their members. In carrying out their activities, farmers' labour groups face a lot of challenges such as high poverty level of farmers (M =3.0), low extension contact and poor health status of farmers (M = 2.7 respectively), and ruralurban migration (M=2.6) among others. Policy statements that can improve the socioeconomic status of farmers, strengthen rural organizations and strong research-extension-farmer-linkage were suggested. Journal Seek, Scientific Commons, and http://journal.aesonnigeria.org Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) http://www.ajol.info/index.php/jae Results and Discussion Socio-economic variables of respondentsThe socio-economic characteristics of the respondents were presented in Table 1. According to the table majority (75.00%) of the farmers were males with a mean age of about 51 years. Majority (45.63%) of these farmers had primary education, though 30.00% had secondary education and only 3.13% of the farmers had tertiary education. The findings revealed that, 78.76% of the respondents are literate, and high or fairly literate farmers may be favourably disposed to accept and adopt farm technologies than the illiterate ones. Adejo, et al (2012) reported that the more educated a farmer is the more he/she becomes more civilized and informed about scientific agricultural practices. The table further revealed that most (55.00%) of the farmers had a household size of between 1-5 persons with a mean farm size of about 3 hectares and mean farming

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This study was carried out to analyse the impact of ill health on agricultural outputs in rural areas of Kogi state, central Nigeria. The motivation derives from the fact that rural areas which are strategically important for national food security are more prone to health hazards as a result of the poor nature of health services arising partly from neglect by government. The objectives were to present the socioeconomic characteristics of the rural farm households and identify the prevailing health and agricultural production nexus in the area. The use of multistage random sampling procedure was employed in the selection of 263 rural households for questionnaire administration in order to elicit relevant data related to their farming enterprises and health. The use of descriptive statistics and production function analysis were employed. The study revealed that the average age of the household heads was 46.4 years while the average household size was 6.5 persons. Also, the average farm size was 1.43 ha and the average number of years of formal education was found to be 7.4. Furthermore, the study revealed that the most prominent disease conditions affecting farm families were malaria fever, typhoid fever and diarrhea and these led to an average of 8.2 days reduction in time available for farm work in a farming season. Result from the production function analysis revealed that the elasticities of farm size (0.419), family size (0.099), number of contacts with extension staff (0.018), labour (0.012) and naira amount of credit accessed (0.25) were positively signed and significant at 1%, 10%, 1%, 5% and 1% respectively; while number of days of farm work lost to ill health was negatively signed (-0.09) and significant at 5%. Findings suggest that focusing on number of days of farming activities lost to ill health in a household might help elicit a clearer picture of the effect of transient ill health on agricultural production. More research and development effort in the provision of and accessibility to health care in the rural areas in order to reduce the incidence of diseases are recommended. Such efforts should also include the provision of adequate health and environmental education for the rural population as the most common ailments discovered in the study area are actually hygiene and environment related.

ABSTRACT:The (M= 3.34 SD= 0.860), and child labour act (M= 3.11 SD= 0.860). While the constraining factors to their awareness and use of these laws were lack of access to agro-information (M= 3.20) and low extension contact (M= 3.10), among others. It is recommended that key players in farm industry should create the necessary awareness to enable farmers be aware of the existence and relevance of farm labour laws.