Data survey

This data article describes a cross-sectional questionnaire dataset collected from 221 smallholder farming households. The data were gathered to document the production constraints farmers experience, the information sources they use when making farm management decisions, their ownership and current use of digital technology, and the agricultural advisory functions and communication channels they prefer. A structured, closed-ended questionnaire was administered face-to-face by trained enumerators. The instrument covered farm size, crops cultivated, water source, production constraints, decision-making information sources, mobile device ownership, current use of agricultural applications or sensors, preferred advisory functions, preferred delivery channels, and the perceived importance of local-language communication. Responses were digitised, coded, and summarised as frequency and percentage distributions; multiple-response items were coded as binary indicators, so category percentages within those items do not sum to 100. The dataset is distributed as an anonymised, row-per-respondent raw data file, a variable codebook, a summary-statistics workbook, the analysis script that reproduces every figure and table reported here, and the questionnaire as administered. The data are presented in four figures and three tables covering farm and household characteristics, the frequency of reported production constraints, the ranking of preferred advisory functions, digital access relative to agricultural technology use, and the distribution of preferred communication channels. These data are reusable for feature elicitation and requirements specification for digital agricultural advisory platforms, for user segmentation and adoption modelling, for training and validating rule-based or machine learning classifiers of advisory preference, and for comparison with equivalent surveys in other smallholder farming regions.