James Timothy, Amonjenu Anthon
Abstract
Whereas the demand for bush meat consumption is high in Kaduna State of Nigeria, the demand can only be sustained by creating self employment by agricultural graduates who have mastered the skills of grass-cutter farming. This is why this study identified skills required by Agricultural Education Graduates in: planning for Grasscutter farming, housing construction for grasscutter farming and breeding Grasscutter in Kaduna state. Three research questions of what are the skills required by Agricultural Education Graduates in planning for Grasscutter farming, housing construction for Grasscutter farming and breeding Grasscutter in Kaduna state were answered by the study while three null hypotheses were formulated and tested at the 0.05 level of significance. The study adopts survey research design. The study was carried out in Kaduna state using a target population of 241 made up of 48 animal science lecturers and 193 agricultural extension agents across the agricultural development zones in Kaduna State. The entire population was purposively used for the study. The instrument of data collection was a 30-items structured questionnaire title “Glasscutter Farming Skills Questionnaire (GFSQ)” developed by the researchers from literature reviewed. The GFSQ was subjected to face and content validity by three validates. The instrument was trial tested on 15 respondents in Plateau State and the result was subjected to reliability analysis using Cronbach Alpha method which yielded a reliability coefficient of 0.91. The GFSQ was used for data collection by the researcher with the help of three research assistants. Data collected for the study was analyzed using mean ratings and standard deviation to answer research questions and t-test statistics to test the null hypotheses at the 0.05 level of significance. The findings of study revealed 10 skills in planning, 10 skills in housing construction and 10 skills in breeding of grasscutter are required respectively for success in grasscutter farming. Based on the findings of this study, it was recommended amongst others that the identified skills in this study should be incorporated into the programme of the skills acquisition centre’s in the state so that it could be used for retraining the unemployed agricultural education graduates for self-employment.