Influencing Factors of Soil and Water Conservation

The Ethiopian economy is predominantly agrarian, where almost half of the GDP is contributed by agricultural sector. However, the performance of the sector is very weak and suffers from various setbacks. Technological backwardness, environmental degradation, population increase and related pressure. The Amhara Regional State is one which highly affected by land degradation through soil erosion. To reverse the severity of the problem, soil and water conservation practices were introduced in different parts of the region including the study area. However, the attempt has been limited. Various factors, such as, households, socio-economic, physical and institutional factors, are attributed for the limited soil and water conservation practices of the past decades. The result of binary logit also showed that, total farm size, household labor availability, training on soil and water conservation practices and farm slopes were the major factors that affect the adoption of improved soil and water conservation practices positively, while farm distance of the households from the residence is negatively significant with plots far to the residences.