Abstract
Maize has been rightly remarked as the Miracle Crop owing to its varied significance. As an important cereal crop, maize has got a significant place in the agricultural economy of Dindigul district. In this paper, an attempt is made to identify the determinants of yield, which prevent farmers producing maize from achieving the potential yield of maize under unirrigated situations at the farm level. Only 300 unirrigated Maize cultivators has selected from Dindigul district of Tamil Nadu. In the case of unirrigated maize cultivation, the explanatory variables human labour (X2), machine labour/bullock labour (X3) and seeds (X4) have been found to be dominant and most influential determinants of yield for small farmers. For large farmers the independent variables seeds (X4), fertilizers (X5) and net return (X7) were observed to be dominant and most influential determinants of unirrigated maize. This implies that an additional percentage increase of each of these two independent variables, seeds (X4) and net return (X7) is capable of increasing unirrigated maize yield by 0.2220, 0.2906 percent respectively for the total farmers. For all the three categories of farmers namely, small, large and total, three variables human labour (X2), seeds (X4) and net return (X7) were found to have greater impact on yield per acre and also emerged
statistically significant. Most of the variables were found statistically significant.
Keywords: Unirrigated Maize, Maize Cultivation, Small Farmers, Large Farmers, Yield Determinants
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