Pattern of Land Use among Selected Crop Farmers in Osun State

In Western Nigeria, farmland is seriously fragmented as a result of tenural arrangement being practiced, leading to individual farm shrinking as the years passed. But the low external input agriculture practiced by the small-scale farmers depends primarily on the expansion of cultivated area at the expense of restorative bush fallow and other land management practices. The nutrient status of the soil thus, declined as the land is getting over utilized. This study therefore examined agricultural land use and management practices among selected crop farmers in Osun State, Nigeria. Three-stage random sampling method was used to select 360 farmers in Ola-Oluwa, Ayedaade, Egbedore, Osogbo, Ife-South and Atakumosa-West local government areas-all distributed among the three agro ecological zones of the State. Out of the 360 copies of questionnaire administered, 301 were found useful for the study. Both descriptive and farming system analysis were used to analyze the primary data. The results showed that 39.5% of the farmers were between 36 and 45 years of age, >84% took farming as their main occupation, 85.8% of the farmer s household members were literate and 6% of the farmers did not actually own the land they cultivated. Farming system analysis revealed average farm size of 3.07 ha and a labour-intensive farming operation.