Adoption of artificial insemination technology and its intensity of use in Eastern Tigray National Regional State of Ethiopia

Abstract

Background The study was focused on the adoption and intensity of adoption of artificial insemination (AI) Technology in Saesie-tsaedaemba District of Tigray Region, Ethiopia. AI is one of the most important and valuable dairy technology that has been used for genetic improvement for several years in the study area. However, there was little empirical information about major factors affecting adoption decision and intensity of AI in the study area. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the status of AI technology adoption and its intensity and to identify major factors influencing the adoption and intensity of use of AI technology. Methods A multistage sampling technique was applied to select study sites and sample households. A structured interview was used to collect data from a total of 204 sample farmers. Besides, key informants interview was used to triangulate, validate, and enrich the findings of the household interview. Results Results of the tobit model regression revealed that households’ level of literacy, milk yield, income, training, access to extension service, mobile ownership, supplementation of concentrated feed and hybrid cattle ownership were found to have a positive and statistically significant relationship with adoption and intensity of AI technology, whereas distance to farmer training centre (FTC) office had shown a negative relationship. Conclusions Adoption of context-based AI technology plays a paramount importance in achieving farm household's food security. The extension system should give more emphasis to the capacity building which is pivotal for introducing, adoption, and scaling out of best practices of dairy technologies. Besides the effort of the government, the participation of the private sector in AI technology is important to achieve wider adoption of AI technology.

Reproductive Disorders of Cattle in the Tole District of Southwest Ethiopia and Their Prevalence and Associated Risk Factors

“…Crossbreeding with improved exotic dairy breeds on a wide scale has been introduced as an option some many years back for upgrading the genetic potential of the indigenous cattle breed and later to enhance the dairy sector in the country [12]. Besides this, the creation and application of artifcial insemination (AI) techniques have altered the breeding of cattle and the genetic advancement of those animals, particularly in the dairy industry [13][14][15].…”

Exploration of Extension Research to Promote Genetic Improvement in Cattle Production: Systematic Review

“…The smallholders are usually focused on supporting themselves through family labor and consuming at least part of the production internally [23]. Among the articles that consider small-or medium-scale producers as the object of study, they are focused on beef [24,25], dairy [18,26,27], dual-purpose [27][28][29] and general cattle [30][31][32][33][34][35] production systems. In contrast, large-scale production was considered in six articles (28.6%) and examined only beef [36] and dairy [37][38][39][40][41] systems.…”

“…For those studies that considered cattle and other livestock [31,36], only the information and results on cattle were considered for this review. As shown in Figure 2a, 38.1% (n = 8) of the articles are related to understanding the use of genetic tools by dairy farmers [18,26,[37][38][39][40][41][42]. Only 14.3% (n = 3) of the articles examine beef production [24,25,36], increasing to 61.9% when production with breeds for dual purpose (n = 3) were considered or when the authors did not make a distinction and referred just to cattle more generally (n = 7).…”

“…These articles seek to understand the decisionmaking process by farmers or the factors that influence the adoption of tools/practices and enable genetic improvement. Articles whose main objective of the study was to analyze the adoption of practices or tools, such as artificial insemination (AI) [18,26,32,35] or sexed semen [37] when applied in production systems, which would lead to genetic improvement were classified in the Indirect Genetic Improvement subgroup. Three of the twenty-one articles were classified as Genetic Programs, which analyze the current situation [29,42] and provide insight [27] into the adequacy of specific breeding programs.…”

“…Extension activities that aim to encourage the use of genetic tools are based on farmers being aware not only of the tools themselves, but also of the importance of the traits to choose in the genetic selection of animals. Consideration of the productive and economic conditions, as well as the social behavior of farmers, is essential for extension services to play an important role in disseminating information and promoting technology use on farms [15,[17][18][19]. The effectiveness of agricultural extension activities through the development of trust, in which farmers participate as the main source of innovation [15], is a strategic approach to improving adoption outcomes, including of genetic tools.…”