Author(s):

Dr. R Jayasankar and Dr. R Muthukumar

Abstract: Among tuberous crop, elephant foot yam (<em>Amorphophallus paeoniifolius</em>) is one of the important tropical tuber crop popular as a food security and as a remunerative cash crop (Suja <em>et al</em>., 2016) ^[7]. The varieties Gajendra and Sree Padma are very popular in Tamil Nadu. It is a tropical and subtropical crop. It requires well distributed rainfall with humid and warm weather during vegetative phase and cool and dry weather during the corm development period. A rich red-loamy soil with a pH range of 5.5-7.0 is preferred.It is cultivated on commercial scale in Erode, Salem, Thiruvannamalai, Thoothukudi and Thanjavur districts of Tamil Nadu in an area of about 1000 hectares. But presently, elephant foot yam cultivation is in crisis. The growers are now facing innumerable problems in yam cultivation. With low yields, high input costs, incidence of diseases and pests, water logging and drought, the area under yam is gradually shrinking. An innovative set of agronomic practices that involves season of planting, field preparation, spacing, planting, inter cropping, irrigation, fertilizer application, pest and disease management and time of harvesting to increase the yam yields significantly. The zero-order correlation co-efficient and linear multiple regression analysis were employed to study the relationship and contribution of characteristics with adoption level in yam cultivation. The study was taken up in the elephant foot yam predominant district of Erode in Tamil Nadu State (India) with a sample size of sixty growers selected based on the random sampling method. The findings revealed that out of fifteen independent variables only five variables were found to be positive and significant relationship with adoption level in both correlation and regression analysis

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