| dc.description.abstract | Climate variability has posed as one of the biggest challenges affecting the globe today especially due to its adverse effects on Agricultural productivity. The over reliance on climate variables such as rainfall, temperature, wind speed and humidity have worsened the sensitivity of agriculture to climate variability. Studies focusing on climate variability have been conducted across different parts of the globe but studies focusing on rural small holder farmers are not prevalent. The current study therefore assessed the impacts of rainfall variability and further developed effective adaptation measures to rainfall variability in Buikwe District. The study further evaluated the effectiveness of the existing strategies to rainfall variability. A cross sectional research approach was undertaken using mixed approaches (qualitative and quantitative methods) where simple random sampling was employed in selection of the households and purposive sampling on the key informants. Data was collected through field surveys, interviews and direct field observations; and then analyzed using thematic content analysis where descriptive statistics (percentages and frequencies) were generated in Microsoft excel spread sheets and then presented inform of tables, pie charts and bar graphs. The study revealed that climate change impacts was highly increasing in the area and at least all respondents had encountered climate change in their day to day living. The determinants of conservation practices include age, size of the household, access to credit, farm size, education levels. These influenced adoption of practices like afforestation, mulching, cover cropping, crop rotation, use of artificial fertilizers, and growing early maturing crops among others. Mixed cropping was found to be the most adopted practice with 96% contribution. The study therefore confirms that, continuous fallowing, agrochemical use, building channels, crop rotation, use of cover crops will increase conservation practices in the study area. The various strategies for rainfall variability were statistically significant with P-values of (0.000). The study observed approximate Tb for Pearson R (9.963) and Spearman rho correlation (9.282) values | en_US |
