Characteristics of Catfish Marketing in Egor Local Government Area of Edo State, Nigeria

Abstract      The study examined the effectiveness of extension service delivery in technology transfer and adoption of improve practices among catfish marketers operating under tropical conditions. A multistage random sample technique was used to selected respondents for the study. Four communities were sampled randomly and fifteen respondents from central markets in each community to give a total sample size of sixty catfish marketers as sample size for the study. Primary and secondary data were used to accomplish the objectives of the study. Data collected were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics.        Identified source of catfish marketing information were farmers, family members, extension agents, newspaper, magazines and bulletins, radio, television, internet and cooperative societies. Majority of the catfish farmers had good knowledge of value addition through forms, location, time, information, and ownership patterns. The outcome indicated that more than 70% of the respondents adopted improved marketing practices such as washing to keep product clean, grading based on weight and sorting standard size to ensure quantity and quality assurance. Many marketers more than half of the sampled respondents adopted solar drying, hot and cold smoking and half drum smoking as a way of preserving and extending the shelf life of fish products. There is poor adoption rate of improved practices such as kanji smoking kiln, agro -waste drying, watenable smoking kiln, choker smoking, basing grading, use of ice block and cold air to preserve fish and grading based on quality indicating quality assurance cannot be guaranteed by the marketers. The outcome of the study indicates extension service delivery was poor giving that 91.7% of the respondents had no contact at all with extension agents and 8.3% that had contact with extension agent had poor frequency with 6.7% claiming one contact in their lifetime. A positive significant relationship (r = 0.001, p ≤ 0.01) between respondents’ use of information channels and their intensity of performing catfish marketing functions was observed. Chi-Square analysis results Showed an increasing effect between respondents’ socio-economic characteristics and their adoption intensity of improved catfish marketing technologies. Identified constraint were found not to be a serious limitation using a bench mark of three.    The study established that extension service delivery was poor but contact a, frequency of contact, experience and scale of operation had positive effect on use of information channel intensity and catfish marketing function performance Key words: Extension service delivery, Adoption. Improved practices