Farmer's Attitude on Sustainable Agriculture and its Determinants: A Case Study in Behbahan County of Iran

Abstract

"The purpose of this study was to conduct a descriptive survey to study the attitudes and perceptions of Iranian farmers on the concepts and thoughts of sustainable agriculture and identifying effective factors on their attitude. The target population of this study consisted of 7314 Behbahan farmers of Khuzestan province of Iran. A sample consisting of 208 respondents was selected through Stratified Sampling. The instrument used for assessing the attitude of respondents on the co ncepts of sustainable agriculture was a questionnaire by reliability 0.78. Responses were grouped based on the differences in standard deviation of mean, which revealed that 73.4% of respondents had moderate attitude towards concepts of sustainable agriculture. The results of study showed that there is positive correlation between literacy, participation in extension courses, off-farm income, farmer's knowledge about sustainable agriculture, level of use of sustainable agriculture methods, extension contacts and job satisfaction and negative correlation between age, experience in agricultural activities, family size and agrarian land with attitude toward sustainable agriculture. According to result of regression the ‘extension contacts’, ‘Farmers knowledge about sustainable agriculture’, ‘Job satisfaction’ and ‘literacy’ are effective factors on farmers attitude toward sustainable agriculture and explained 52.6% of this scale."