Marketing behaviour of sugarcane nursery owners of Maharashtra
Authors: Chavai A.M. , Hemgire S.B. 
Published: October 2021

Sugarcane is main important cash crop. It is one of major crop of earning foreign exchange. The green tops of cane used as a fodder for cattle. Also sugarcane industry provides employment to a larger number of peoples. Now-a-days sugarcane nursery emerges as a new enterprise mainly in rural society. Nursery techniques involve raising seedlings, management and marketing for economical use. These techniques are useful in increasing success rate and reducing manual work. Also nursery seedlings increase germination percentage, useful for maintaining optimum plant population. The use of inputs like water, fertilizer etc., is also low. Hence, nursery is the starting point for successful planting. Successful nursery growing not only requires knowledge, skill and accuracy in the production but also in the marketing. Therefore, marketing of seedlings seems as a special significance in the sugarcane nursery. Marketing is one of the post production activity, which consistently influences the extent and nature of growing as well as profits to nursery owners. Under the present circumstances, there is a need for development of efficient marketing system along with efficient production management in the whole range of marketing activities including packing, transportation techniques, distribution and product standardization. Keeping the above facts in view, the present study was conducted in the year 2020 at Kolhapur district of Maharashtra State with the objectives; to study personal, socio-economic and psychological characteristics of the sugarcane nursery owners, to analyze the marketing behaviour of the sugarcane nursery owners, to find out relationship between personal, socio-economic and psychological characteristics with their marketing behaviour. The “Ex-post-facto” research design was used for the study .The study was conducted purposively in Kolhapur district of Maharashtra state. From Kolhapur district two tehsils namely Shirol and Hatkangale were selected. Seven villages from each tehsil and then ten respondents from each village were selected by nth method of random sampling to comprise a sample of 140 respondents. The data was collected and analyzed with the help of well-structured interview schedule by personal interview with the sugarcane nursery owners and suitable statistical tools. From the research study it was found that majority (65.01 %) of the sugarcane nursery owners were found to be middle age group (36 to 55 years), 52.16 per cent were educated upto secondary school, most (62.87 %) of the respondents had medium (17-30 years) farming experience, more than half (70.01 %) of respondents had fair irrigation status, half of respondents (52.87 %) had marginal size of land holding (Upto 1.00 ha), most (67.15 %) of the nursery owners had small area under nursery, more than half (57.05 %) of the respondents had medium annual income (Upto Rs.758667). The study also revealed that more than one half (67.87%) were grouped under medium level of sources of information, 60.72 per cent of nursery owners had medium level of innovativeness, 62.15 per cent of respondents were grouped under medium level of risk orientation and 72.15 per cent of respondents had medium level of marketing orientation. It was observed that more than half (57.87 %) of sugarcane nursery owners had medium marketing behaviour. Study revealed that the selected independent variables viz., education, land holding, area under nursery, annual income, irrigation status, source of information, risk orientation and marketing orientation were in positive and strongly significant relationship with their marketing behaviour. Whereas, the variable age had negative and non-significant correlation with marketing behaviour, similarly farming experience had positive and non-significant correlation with marketing behaviour of sugarcane nursery owners.