Editorial

Abstract

Welcome to issue 19(2) of the Journal of Agricultural & Food Information! The issue opens with a Society of the Quarter column by Tom Volkening who revisits an organization first profiled in 2006: Seed Savers Exchange, a non-profit dedicated to preserving America’s agricultural heritage through the growing, saving and sharing of heirloom seeds and plants—over 20,000 varieties! In the lead refereed contribution, Robert McGeachin reports the results of his case study to assess processing times associated with various steps in a digitization project—e.g., scanning, file conversion, quality control, metadata creation ingestion into a repository—and they are significant! Those contemplating a digitization project will find his results instructive when factoring in their own human resource costs. Next, Wayne Ganpat, Kathiravan Gopalan, and Joel Dalrymple share insights from their study examining the extent to which Trinidadian consumers made use of nutritional information on product labels to inform food choices. Their findings have implications for national health: although the reading of labels was generally high, insufficient attention was paid to fat and sodium content. Two contributions explore the potential of mobile phone in extension services, from the perspective of both agents and farmers. Mohammad Sadegh Allahyari, Maryam Ranjbar Atashi, and Emily Shea Dunn investigate the feasibility of agents usingmobile technology as an educational tool to replacemore traditional extension methods in Iran; Victor Otene, Jacqueline Ezihe, and Felix Torgenga assess mobile phone usage among farmers in Nigeria. In both cases, economic/income factors, education/skill, and infrastructure/network coverage were major barriers to use. The final three articles examine farmers’ use of information sources to inform agricultural production for various crops. Muhammad Yaseen, Mokbul Ahmad, and Peeyush Soni studied cotton growers in Pakistan and found that they primarily relied on social networks and traditional media and less on extension and modern ICTs. Yeong Sheng Tey et al. surveyed Malaysian vegetable farmers’ sources of information on sustainable practices: extension and family/friends ranked highest. In contrast, the urban mushroom farmers studied by Kwabena Bugyei, Raphael Kavi, Grace Obeng-Koranteng, and Benjamin Folitse in Ghana had ample access to information from multiple sources; unfortunately, over 50% were unaware of them or lacked the technical know-how to apply the information—a useful reminder that information is only one variable in the technology adoption equation.