Affective Factors in the Wheat Farmers' Adoption of Farming Methods of Soil Management in West Azerbaijan Province, Iran

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.