Assessment of farmers’ knowledge, attitude, and challenges towards biofertilizer application in the Northern Region of Bangladesh

Biofertilizer, considered sustainable agricultural input, holds the potential to replace chemical fertilizers and improve soil health. Still, its limited adoption prompts the need to explore farmers’ awareness of the challenges in Bangladesh. Our study focuses on the knowledge, attitude, and challenges related to biofertilizer usage among a hundred randomly selected farmers in the Chapainawabganj District. We exerted a cross-sectional descriptive research technique and a pre-structured questionnaire for data collection through face-to-face interviews. According to the findings, about 52% of the respondents had shallow knowledge about biofertilizers, although the majority (about 67%) had a moderately favorable attitude, indicating enthusiasm to adopt this technology. Additionally, the majority of the farmers strongly supported the idea that increasing publicity initiatives to promote biofertilizer usage would be helpful. Moreover, most of the socio-demographic characteristics of farmers had a significant and positive relationship with their knowledge, where only education and training facilities were positively correlated to their attitude, pointing out that improving these aspects may promote biofertilizer adoption. The study also found that the critical challenges of biofertilizer usage were personal interest gaps, inadequate publicity, lack of awareness about benefits, disorganized training, and high prices or lack of availability. These findings suggest that policymakers and extension service providers should prioritize targeted training and demonstrations to enhance awareness as well as ensure that biofertilizer supplies are affordable and easily accessible.