International Journal of Agricultural Research and Review

Evaluation of brush wood with stone check dam on gully rehabilitation at Assosa, Benishangul gumuz, Ethiopia.

Abstract

Accepted  27^th September, 2017

Gullies are common features throughout the Ethiopian Highlands. Induced environmental degradation comprises not only the loss of soil volume and of arable lands, but also the triggering of landslides or off-site sedimentation problems. This experiment was initiated with the aim of evaluating the effect of bamboo with stone check dam on gully rehabilitation at Assosa for two consecutive research years on farm land. The gully site was selected purposively based on the prevalence of gully erosion. Biophysical and socio -economic data's were collected to evaluate the effectiveness of the measures. The potential of the measure was evaluated using the pin installed in front the check dam to observe the change of gully depth, cross sectional area and soil loss data. A total of 22 households were sampled to assess the perception, acceptance and adoption level of the farmers using simple random sampling technique. the result indicates that the gully depth and volume of soil loss, were reduced from 0.94m to 0.58m and  volume of soil loss from 468 ton/ha/yr to 204 ton/ha/yr. The result indicated that, all of them mentioned the presence and severity of soil erosion on their farm land which is increasing in alarming rate and where all of the farmers mentioned loss of fertile top soil and yield reduction. 95.5% of the farmers were confident enough to rehabilitate the gully using bamboo with stone check dam supplementing with biological measures and all the farmers ratified the effectiveness of the measures to rehabilitate the gully.

Keywords: Gully, soil loss, brush wood, check dams