Factors Affecting Wheat Farmers' Attitudes toward Organic Farming

In recent years the focus on organic farming has been emphasised because of the negative effects of conventional farming. Any persuasion geared toward making farmers adopt organic farming methods requires an investigation of their current attitude toward organic farming. The main purpose of this descriptive-correlational study was to investigate the effective factors that determine farmers' attitudes toward organic farming. The statistical population consisted of all the wheat farmers in the Khodabande township (N = 24,350), of whom 275 were identified based on Cochran's sampling formula and through a stratified, randomised sampling method. The research tool was a researcher-made questionnaire (whose validity was verified by a panel of experts in related fields); to check its reliability, a Cronbach's alpha coefficient was calculated to equal 0.78. The results showed that the attitude of the majority of respondents toward organic farming, at 50.9 percent, was positive, and the attitude of the other 49.1 percent was neutral. Correlation analysis revealed that age, family household number, and experience had a negative meaningful correlation with the farmers' attitude, but education, income, and knowledge of organic farming had a positive meaningful correlation. Comparison analysis showed that there were significant differences between farmers' attitudes toward organic farming based on the different cultivation methods as well as the use of pesticides and herbicides. Logistical regression analysis revealed that the factors that significantly (p<0.05) affected farmers' attitudes toward organic farming included the farmer's experience, income, and their knowledge of organic farming.