West Shewa and East wollega Zones have a promising climatic condition for irrigation, considering irrigation potential of zones irrigation pump has been distributed for small holder pumped irrigation to increase major irrigated crops production and productivity. Thus, this study was tailored to assess the constraints and financial profitability of major pump irrigated crops with a view to update information that are already documented in the literature. This research contributes to a better understanding of the financial profitability of pumped irrigated agricultural crops. Multistage and purposive sampling method was used to select the farmers for the surveys. The sample has covered irrigation pump user on proportion to size basis. The primary data were generated through conducting a well-designed farm level survey. The survey was conducted covering 237 Small holder pumped irrigator. A profit function approach was used to examine profitability of major pumped irrigation in study areas. The major problems of pumped small holder irrigation were technical issues, economic barriers, socio-institutional factors and environmental pressures. Financial profitability has been estimated for Wheat, cabbage, Tomato, potato, Onion and green pepper and Onion had the highest Net farm income of 47569.30ETB followed by Tomato which has NFI of 40651.85ETB. Although the returns from onion were high as compared to the other crops considered, tomato were widely grown by the farmers in the study areas. Thus, concerned bodies should support pumped irrigation farmers to expand onion and tomato production by reducing other irritated crops in order o increase farm income from pumped irrigation. Irrigation researchers should work on water productivity increment.
Refera et al. (Tue,) studied this question.