Determinants of cocoa farmer’s participation in the innovation platform of the humidtropics programme in Southwestern Nigeria

Open Access JournalIn an effort to determine factors influencing cocoa farmer’s participation in innovation platform (IP) activities of the Humidtropics programme, data was collected from purposively selected 177 farmers using multistage technique sampling technique and was gathered through the use of structured interview schedule. Data were collected and analyzed with percentage, frequency counts, mean, standard deviation and factor analysis. The study shows the mean age of the cocoa farmers in the IP to be 51.16±12.64 with about 52% aged above 50 years, female were only (23.73%), with more than 75th percentile literacy level and only about 31% of respondents generate annual income from farming above ₦50,000 while about 70% made below ₦40,000 extra income from other occupation. The mean farm size was 16.87 ±16.04 acre, farming experience 25.42±10.48 years and household size was 9.78±5.52. The six significant determinants of cocoa farmer’s participation in IP arranged in order of magnitude are psychological factor (λ = 3.158), experience factor (λ = 2.164), community related factor (λ = 1.697) educational factor (λ = 1.854), economic factor (λ =1.438) and internal factor (λ = 1.113). The summative effect of the identified factors accounted for 76.17 % variation observed in cocoa farmer’s participation in the IP

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This study was designed to determine the degree of resistance to hypotonic saline for different variants of blood haemoglobin that are found locally, relative to normal adult red cell haemoglobin and to one another. Blood specimens from 25 individuals, five for each type of haemoglobin variant, were exposed to varying degrees of hypotonicity at room temperature and the optical density (OD) was read after  incubation. The pattern of haemolysis was consistent in all samples for each haemoglobin variant.  HbAA was found to be most susceptible to saline hypotonicity, followed by HbAC and HbAS while HbSC and HbSS were highly resistant to lysis when exposed to varying degrees of hypotonicity. The three variants containing HbA, that is HbAA, HbAC, HbAS had close similarity in the pattern of haemolysis. Similarly, HbSC and HbSS exhibited a close pattern as well. We suggest that the pattern observed in the two categories may be as a result of the presence of the adult haemoglobin gene (A) in the former group and the presence of the sickle haemoglobin gene (S) in the latter, respectively. We observed that the pattern of susceptibility to saline hypotonicity found in these variants has an inverse relationship to the severity of clinical manifestation commonly observed in individuals having these different haemoglobin variants