The adoption of integrated pest management (IPM) technologies by cotton growers in the Punjab

Pesticides applications generate negative externalities for health, environment and also add up to economiccost to cotton producers. Consequently, there is an urgent need of alternative methods of pest management forenvironment friendly cotton production systems. Integrated pest management (IPM) is a right method which canreduce or minimize the use of pesticides as well as can lessen the cost. The cross-sectional data was collected fromdistrict Jhang. A random sample of 99 farmers was selected to collect the data. The main factors which influencethe adoption of IPM in cotton are age, education, farm size, farm labour, family size, progressive farmers andopinion leader farmers. The logistic regression was used to estimate the model. Three variables are significant at 5percent level of significance and two variables are significant at 10 percent level of significance. The family size andopinion leader farmer (variables) are non-significant. The Hosmer Lemeshow test value was 0.316 (Chi-square)which was non-significant indicating that overall model was correctly specified. The estimated odds ratio foreducation, farm size, family labour, progressive farmer, and opinion leader farmer were 1.49, 1.07, 11.08, 12.26and 4.27, respectively. All these factors had positive influence on the adoption of IPM technology by the magnitudeof their respective odds ratio. However, the estimated odds ratio for family size was 0.48 and for age was 0.88(both the estimated coefficient have negative signs), which suggests a negative influence on the adoption of IPM.