Skills, improvement needs of rural small scale tomato farmers, production management in Ebonyi State

Ogba, Ernest Ituma and Egbe, Benjamine Onwe (2025) Skills, improvement needs of rural small scale tomato farmers, production management in Ebonyi State. Global Journal of Engineering and Technology Advances, 23 (2). pp. 185-194. ISSN 2582-5003

The low production of tomato fruit vegetable in our diet has created a lot of concerns to the researchers. However, Report of Insufficient Skills of Rural Small Scale tomato farmers in production operation, is another serious observational worries to the researchers. Therefore, the researchers seek to investigate empirically skills improvement Needs of Rural Small Scale tomato farmers in production operation. Survey research design was adopted. The researchers formulated 3 research questions and 3 objective to guide the study. The population for the study was one hundred and six (106) (respondents) rural small scale tomato farmers the registered in the (3) Agriculture zone in Ebonyi State. There was no sampling as the population was manageable for the study. 456 items questionnaire was developed by the researchers from the tomato production operational managements in pre-planting, planting and post-planting-operations was used in collecting data for the study. The data collected was analyzed using need gap analysis. It was found out that Rural Small Scale tomato farmers needed improvement in pre-planting skills operation, planting skills operation and post-planting skills operations. It was recommended that all the skill items in this study should be used by extension Agents to the rural small scale tomato farmers training, workshops and seminar both Government and Non-government Agent to boost production of the fruit vegetables.