Author : Satria Putra Utama

Summary : The study sought to describe the socio-economic characteristic, psychological attributes and political factors of the farmers in selected irrigated Command Area Development (ICAD) projects in Bengkulu Province, and to determine the association of these variables with irrigation behavior. Tertiary blocks were used, clustered into upstream, midstream and downstream areas. After block clustering, tertiary blocks were selected at random. Then from each selected tertiary block, respondents were taken from the population data at random. There were 150 farmers chosen as respondents for this study. Descriptive analysis of dependent variables showed that most of the farmers (70.7%) reached only up to the elementary school level; most (72.7%) had household size below 5 persons; and had organizational affiliation of seven (7) years. The farmers had an average annual income of Rp 2,744,842.00 ($ 1,168.01). Their private profitability was Rp 1,060,035.00 ($ 451.07) per farm. The majority of them (87.3%) had cultivated farm size of 0.82 hectare on the average. More than half (56.2%) of the farmers had high motivation, high level of perception (52.7%) towards ICAD project, highly aware of value orientation (50.0%) had positive attitude towards ICAD project (56.7%), and high level of irrigation behavior (52.2%).