Abstract

The study analyzed the adoption of tomato postharvest technologies among smallholder farmers in Katsina State, Nigeria. Multistage sampling technique was used for the study and primary data was collected from a sample size of one hundred and sixty-two (162) smallholder tomato farmers. Both the Technology Acceptance Model and more traditional descriptive statistics (mean, frequency, percentage, and standard deviation) were used to examine the data. The survey found that most tomato growers were men (85%), that they had a mean age of 39, that their average household size was 10 people, and that their average farm was 0.7 hectares in size. The study also revealed that almost all the respondents accepted the tomato postharvest technologies promoted by Technoserve’s Yieldwise project; the extent of adoption was estimated at 71%. The acceptance level of the tomato postharvest technologies was high and encouraging, and the technologies were adopted to a reasonable extent in the study area. The study recommended the need for more women participation in tomato production, smallholder farmers should form viable groups so that they can easily access credits from public and private financial institutions to raise the adoption level and tomato farmers using reusable plastic crates, tomato solar dryer and zero energy cooling chamber should be encouraged on saving of replacement cost to ensure sustainability.