Vol. 8, Issue 1, Part E (2026)

Nursery is a place where plants are propagated, cared for, grown and then sold for use in commercial or residential gardens. Improved quality seedlings are raised under ideal circumstances until they are ready to be planted on a small or large scale. The study was undertaken in three districts of Assam namely, Jorhat, Nagaon and Golaghat which were selected purposively as it is located in close proximity to the only Agricultural University in the state. A sample size of 90 was taken using convenience sampling. 30 nurseries were selected from each district under the study. Primary data for the current study was collected in the month of April- June, 2023. The findings of the present investigation revealed that majority of the respondents (55.56%) belonged to the middle-aged category. Most of the respondents (46.67%) had high level of education. Majority (56.67%) of the respondents belonged to small sized family while 91.1% of the respondents had marginal land holding. Most (62.22%) of the respondents belonged to medium income category. Majority (80%) of the respondents had easy access to labour available on both weekdays and weekends. The study also revealed that most (52.22%) of the respondents had medium level experience in nursery business while majority (71.11%) of the respondents had medium level of training exposure and had attended 1-3 number of trainings conducted by various external sources. Findings revealed that while personal and social problems were comparatively less severe, operational and resource-related issues posed major challenges. Among personal constraints, lack of time due to family burden and limited prior experience were significant. Land utilization difficulties mainly arose from inadequate knowledge of proper space management, whereas marketing problems were largely due to poor understanding of marketing techniques and standard production practices. Transportation challenges such as high costs and limited vehicle availability also affected nursery operations. Institutional issues were marked by lack of coordination and insufficient training opportunities. Although natural calamities like floods and heavy rainfall impacted some nurseries, input-related problems were the most critical. The non-availability of desired inputs at the right time and their high cost ranked as the top constraints based on Weighted Mean Score (WMS). Overall ranking indicated that input-related problems (mean score 2.081) were the most severe, followed by land utilization (1.835) and storage-related problems (1.784). Social and climatic factors were found to be relatively less influential.