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Abstract
Soil Management (SM) is critical to human well-being that it
is more important now because of meeting the high demands
for food production and satisfying the needs of an increasing
world population. Therefore, the purpose of this descriptivecorrelation
study was to investigate the effective factors on
wheat farmers’ adoption of Farming Methods of Soil Management
(FMSM). The research instrument was a structural questionnaire
with close-ended questions, which its validity and reliability
was confirmed. The target population included all wheat farmers
in West Azerbaijan Province (N=24949) that among of them,
371 wheat farmers was chosen by using Krejcie & Morgan’s
table through multi-stage sampling (n=371). The descriptive
results showed the majority of farmers (237 or 63.90%) had
moderate adoption of FMSM. These results also indicated
farmers used three FMSM namely 1) using crop rotation, 2)
using animal fertilizers, and 3) using soil testing more than
others did. On the other hands, there were significant relationships
between some of personal, farming, social, economic, and extension-
education characteristics of farmers and the amount of
their adoption of FMSM. Finally, stepwise regression analysis
revealed that 35.30% (R2 =0.353) of the variances in the amount
of farmers' adoption of FMSM could be explained by the five
variables namely farm size, knowledge about FMSM, the amount
of extension contacts about FMSM, distance between farm and
agricultural service centers, and the amount of attitude toward
FMSM.