How channels of knowledge acquisition affect farmers' adoption of green agricultural technologies: evidence from Hubei province, China

Farmers' adoption of green agricultural technologies (GATs) could reduce the negative environmental impacts of traditional agriculture in China. Despite the benefits of GATs, their adoption rate has not been high. While previous studies have examined the information and communication technologies that influence the adoption of GATs, most have selected only one of the GATs and have not distinguished between public and private channels of knowledge acquisition. In this paper, based on a sample of 732 rural households from Hubei Province, we used a negative binomial model to examine the role of knowledge acquisition channels on GATs adoption. Overall, we found that radio and the government (through its face-to-face channels) are positively associated with farmers' adoption of GATs; however, farmers adopted more GATs when they had acquired knowledge from the government than from radio. A possible explanation and a policy implication is that direct communication with farmers and practical demonstration of the benefits of GATs are preferred to passive reception of information.