Management Gap in Boro Rice Cultivation at Farmers’ Fields

The main focus of this paper was to determine gap in management between recommended and actual practices followed by the farmers in Boro rice cultivation that resulted a gap between potential and actual yield. The management practices included in this study were: nursery fertilization, seed rate, time of transplanting, seedling age, number of seedling/hill, line to line and hill to hill spacing, doses of urea, TSP, MoP and gypsum, time of urea top dressing at the different phases of growth, measure against insect and pest, irrigation, weeding and time of harvesting. Data were collected from randomly selected 250 farmers of six villages of Fulbari Upazila under Kurigram district from December 2005 to July 2006. Results indicated that 72% of the farmers had medium gap (24 to 51% gaps) in their overall management while 17%of the farmers had low gap (4 to 23%) i.e. they applied a little less than the full package of the recommended selected 18 practices in modern boro rice cultivation. But 11% of the farmers had high gap (52 to 64%) in management resulted a lower yield. Among the characteristics of the farmers farming experience, knowledge, attitude towards modern Boro rice cultivation, information source use, and decision making ability showed significant negative relationship with the management gap resulting to yield gap.