EVALUATION OF FARMERS PERCEPTION AND ACTION LEARNING FROM FARMERS FIELD DAYS DEMONSTRATION ON USING BRIQUETTE UREA FERTILIZER IN HYBRID MAIZE PRODUCTION

Best management practices for the crop are focused mainly on effectiveness of fertilizer. Being small holder farmers, fertilizer is the most expensive input for them and their ultimate goal is to get maximum profit with minimum input cost. To know the effect of urea deep placement (UDP) technology, experiments were conducted during rainy season and winter season, 2017. The four field days (8th and 9th August, 2017 and 26th and 28th February, 2018) were organized and conducted on the Department of Agricultural Research, Yezin and Tatkone Agricultural Research Farm. The neighbouring townships farmers are invited to attend the field days and farmers were randomly selected from the field day attendees. Knowledge of farmers about maize production practices and UDP technology being promoted were recorded in a short survey structured questionnaire. From the survey questionnaires, most farmers are using urea fertilizer for N source and 56.81 to 113.62 kg N ha -1 is the common rate for them. They usually split the amount of urea into 2 to 3 times. Farmers do not know UDP method with briquette form. This study highlighted that by using the entire N in the form of briquette at basal showed better performance with respect to yield and nitrogen uptake efficiency.