Information Disorder and Climate-Smart Agricultural Practice in Oyo State, Nigeria

Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) has emerged as an important framework for improving resilience, productivity and sustainability in the face of worsening climate challenges. However, the effectiveness of CSA interventions is often threatened by information disorder, which includes misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. In Nigeria, particularly in rural areas of Oyo State, farmers are increasingly exposed to inaccurate, inconsistent, or misleading agricultural information across formal and informal channels. Extant studies emphasis on information disorder has been on politics, health and foreign contexts, leaving a research gap on climate-smart agriculture information disorder among Nigerians. This study investigated understanding and knowledge, sources, the influence of information disorder on the adoption of Climate-Smart Agriculture practices and how farmers verify CSA-related information.

Diffusion of Innovation Theory, Inoculation Theory and Global Village Theory serves as the theoretical background to the study. An exploratory sequential mixed-method research design was adopted. A combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Expert purposive sampling was employed to select four agricultural extension officers assigned to Eruwa, Akufo, Ijaye, and Ogbomosho farm settlements in Oyo State for interviews. Questionnaire was administered to 294 farmers drawn from a total population of 1,114 farmers in the selected settlements using criterion purposive sampling. In-depth interview was also conducted with 29 experienced farmers. Quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS (version 20), while qualitative data were thematically analyzed using NVivo.

72% of farmers have a general awareness of what CSA information disorder entails. This knowledge varies based on exposure and experience. Thematic analysis revealed that farmers associate information disorder with misleading weather forecasts, false input quality claims, inaccurate agricultural advice, and unfulfilled government promises. The study found that the major sources of CSA information disorder was government agencies (59.8%) and social media (59%). Information disorder among farmers has led to distrust (55%), financial losses (53%), and hesitation toward adopting CSA practices (36%), making about 20% of farmers revert to traditional methods. Farmers relied on extension officers, Agricultural institutions, personal experience, and farmer groups for fact-checking. Findings also show that the major challenges of fact-checking CSA information are conflicting information from trusted sources, misleading information from peers, poor network coverage, language barriers, and CSA technical jargons.

Information disorder weakens the adoption of CSA among farmers in Oyo State as result of loss of trust in CSA information received by farmers. It recommended that empowering trusted communication sources especially extension services and media literacy for farmers is important to counter its impact. There is need to improve CSA communication through fact-checked, culturally relevant content from trusted sources.