Awareness of biofertilizer among paddy farmers in Sungai Rambai, Melaka / Fatin Nurul Zanariah Zulkeflee

Biofertilizer is natural fertilizer containing microorganisms that will benefit both the plants and soil when applied. Biofertilizer will facilitate the biological Nitrogen fixation to give more advantages to the plants. Biofertilizers is one of the choice of nutrients in plantation. Due to the increasing awareness on organic farming and organic products all over the world, biofertilizer can be the best substitute for the chemical fertilizers. However, the use of biofertilizers are still limited among the farmers as the biofertilizer takes a longer time to respond compared to the chemical feltilizers. Even there are many campaigns and programmes held on biofertilizer, the chemical fertilizer are still being the first choice of the farmers. In this study, a set of questions is set up to identify the level of awareness of paddy farmers on the biofertilizer. The respondent is chosen from the paddy farmers that are registered under the Pertubuhan Peladang Kawasan. The questionnaire is distributed to 76 fanners in Sungai Rambai out of 95 total numbers of fanners in Sungai Rambai. The total number of respondent is detennined according to the Krejcie & Morgan table. When the data has been collected, the data is analyzed using the SPSS software to study the correlation of the variables and the farmers' awareness on biofertilizer. The result obtained shows that only several variables such as the attitude and barriers are contributing to the awareness level of fanners. Besides identifying the level of awareness, this study is also conducted to know if the barriers and communication factors are affecting the farmers awareness on biofertilizer.