**1. Introduction**

Globally and particularly across Nigeria, current food production system may produce impressive quantities, but the health and environmental costs it brings have continued to demonstrates its limits [1, 2]. Organic farming provides basis for maintaining environmental goods and services at the farm level. According to [3] organic farming promotes ecological resilience, improved biodiversity, healthy management of farms and the surrounding environment, and builds on community knowledge and strength. It is therefore on this backdrop that organic farming is steadily gaining popularity all over the world and has continued to receive increasing support from government and the private sector [4, 5]. Therefore, from the researchers view, organic livestock farming is a system that rears, processes and preserves livestock without any form of chemical such as feed additives, growth, ovulation and appetite inducement among others. Livestock produce from organic farming is always one-hundred percent (100%) organic and un-denatured. In addition, rural famers can be seen as farmers living in the rural areas, most of them have low level of education, low access to information, their major occupation is subsistence farming with low farm size and farm input. They are also generally characterized by poverty, poor health condition and poor standard of living. For the purpose of the present study rural livestock farmers rear livestock, keep poultry, and engage in other wild animal hunting among others. Moreover, livestock organic farming production can offer promising opportunities for ensuring safe food, environmental sustainability, high livestock yield and income. Incidentally, empirical evidence on the present discourse is still relatively very scarce. Although, a significant contribution has been made by various scholars [6–8], regrettably, these studies did not dwell on organic livestock practices and their knowledge level in South-east Nigeria. Therefore, this presents a dearth in research and became increasingly pertinent that the study was systematically undertaken.

### **2. Methodology**

The study was conducted in South-East, Nigeria. South-East comprised of five states, namely, Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo (**Figure 1**). It has an estimated land mass of 32,610 km<sup>2</sup> and a population of 22,583,076 [9]. South-East lies between longitude 2o 61<sup>1</sup> and 60 .32<sup>1</sup> East and latitudes 6<sup>o</sup> 741 and 8o 151 North of Equator with the mean annual temperature ranges from 21.6°C to 32.4°C while the annual rainfall ranges from 720 mm to 1440 mm in the rainforest region [10, 11]. The State has good climatic condition suitable for livestock farming and a good proportion of the population are essentially livestock farmers. A multistage and purposive random sampling procedure was used in the selection of respondents who are involved in organic livestock farmers. Firstly three (3) States namely Abia Ebonyi and Enugu were randomly selected from the five (5) geopolitical zone of South-East, Zone of Nigeria. Secondly, three Local Government Areas (LGAs) were purposively selected from each of selected States giving a total of nine (9) local government areas for the study. Purposive sampling was used to select only farmers who are practicing mainly organic farming. Thirdly, three (3) communities was purposively selected from each of the nine (9) selected LGAs based on the concentration of organic farmers to give a total of twenty-seven (27) communities. Finally, a stratified random sampling technique was used to select fourteen (14) livestock farmers from each of the 27 selected communities to give a total sample size of five-hundred and four (504) livestock farmers for the study. The list of livestock farmers in the communities, which forms the sample frame, was obtained *Do Rural Livestock Farmers Have Knowledge of Organic Livestock Farming Practices? Lesson… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.99961*

**Figure 1.** *Map of Nigeria showing the study area.*

from the zonal extension agents of each of the State Agricultural Development Programme in the selected States. Data collected were analyzed using likert scale type. A well structured questionnaire was the main tool for data collection. Data collected were analyzed using likert scale type. The weighted mean was given below as follows:

$$\mathbf{X}\_{\mathbf{w}} = \frac{\sum\_{j=1}^{5} \boldsymbol{m}i(5i)}{\mathbf{n}}$$

Where Xw = Weighted Mean Score.

n = No: of respondents.

The various attributes were rated in a 4- point likert scale type of questions of Very High Knowledge (VHK) (4); High Knowledge (HK) (3); Moderate Knowledge (MK) (2) and No Knowledge (NK) (1). Using the method of mean score analysis, a discriminatory mean of 2.50 was produced. The mean value of each attribute equal to or above (x̄= ≥ 2.50) was regarded as an accepted decision while attributes with mean value less than (x̄= ≤ 2.50) was regarded as a rejected decision (**Table 1**).


#### **Table 1.**

*Sampling and sample proportion for the study.*
