Abstract:
Sri Lankan agriculture sector has shown a technological transformation with addressing
traditional challengers and barriers to improve production, productivity, and quality of the
products in the last decades. Protected houses, green-houses, or in terms of growing crops under
a controlled environment can be identified as one of the newly emerged sub sectors in the Sri
Lankan agriculture sector. The protected house farming community in Sri Lanka is still unable
to achieve the desired perspectives of adapting to those technologies. This study was conducted
to analyse the current context of the small and medium-scale protected framers in Southern
province, Sri Lanka. The investigation was done by interviewing 30 small and medium-scale
protected house farmers using a semi-structured type questionnaire. Management practices
including irrigation, fertilizers and raw materials, transportation, financial status and market
availability and technological adaptations were considered as thematic areas for the analysis.
When considering labour used for crop management practices ,93% of the protected house
farmers only used family labour for the daily crop management practices. Only 7% of the target
group used both hired labour and family labour for the crop management in the protected house.
Each farmer utilized an average of 4.5 labour hours per day for 1000ft2 for management
practices including training, fertigation and harvesting. Ninety five percentage of respondents
stated that they cannot leave their protected house without any supervision because of the daily
management practices including irrigation and fertilization. Every farmer was aware of the
importance of controlling microclimate conditions to increase crop productivity and the role of
automation for it. They reported that the bell pepper and salad cucumber did not meet the market
quality during prolonged high temperatures. Results revealed and highlighted those major issues
on lack of technological system implementations for microclimate control, inability to leave the
crop at least a day, scarcity of labour and unavailability of a proper consultation channel. The
highlighted major issues have hindered the development of protected agriculture in Sri Lanka.
Strengthening of the consultancy services on management practices and new technologies that
potential to adapt local existing conditions are recommended to increase the productivity and
promote adaptation to protected house cultivations.
