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Land is one the major economic resources that plays a critical role in the production
of goods and services. It exhibits distinct characteristics which makes it different from the other
factors of production. Some of these features include being subject to the law of diminishing
returns, immobile, a free gift of nature, varies in quality and limited in area. Based on this, land
required to be carefully nurtured. Therefore, the aim of this study was to identify factors
affecting the adoption of soil management practices by smallholder crop farmers in Ondo State of
Nigeria, using binary logistic regression model. A multi-stage sampling technique was used for the
collection of data from smallholder food crops farmers in the study area. In the first stage, four
Local Government Areas were purposively selected because of large concentration of food crops
farmers in the areas. The Local Government Areas selected for this study were Odigbo, Okitipupa,
Irele and Ile-Oluji/Oke-Igbo. In the second stage, five villages were randomly chosen from each of
the Local Government Area. In the third stage, six farmers producing food crops in the area were
randomly selected from each of the five villages. Thirty farmers were interviewed in each of the
Local Government Area selected such that a total of 120 farmers were sampled and interviewed for
this study. The socio-economic characteristics of the farmers showed that 70.9% of the farmers
were between the ages of 30-59 years while 75.8% of the farmers had married. The married
farmers have more responsibility than unmarried and this would spur them to adopt soil management
practices. More than half of the farmers were educated with household size between 5 and 9 people.
This implies that many of the farmers adopt soil management practices. The percentage correct
classifications for the maintenance of vegetation cover model, non-tillage with herbicide and fallow
model were all as high as 76.3, 69.5 and 72.9 respectively. Results also showed that farmers were
constrained by poor market prices (29.2%), absence of information (25%) and shortage of land
(20.8%).The variables used in the study were statistically significant at 1%, 5% and 10% levels
respectively.
Keywords: Adoption, Smallholders, Soil Erosion, Soil Management, Logistic Regression Models