Author(s):

A Dharanipriya, C Karthikeyan and S Panneerselvam

Abstract: Weather is considered crucial for agriculture as it determines the productivity of the crops. It is evident that farmers incur crop losses for being unaware of the aberrant weather events. Hence provision of weather based agricultural advices to farmer’s gains paramount importance in this situation. However, farmer’s acceptance of the advice heavily depends upon their preference of varied aspects of the service. In this regard, the present study was undertaken to understand the different aspects of the service which is appropriate to the farmers needs to increase the adoption of advisories. Five key aspects of the service viz., frequency of messages, timing of the message, source of message, mode of feedback and the response time (time taken to respond to farmer’s queries) were identified to seek farmers’ opinion. Conjoint analysis was performed to estimate the utility and relative importance values for each aspect of the service. The results revealed that the farmers prefer to receive weather based agro advisory services once in a week from agricultural scientists of TNAU during afternoon hours. Regarding the mode of feedback & response time, text message given either instantly or within a day was most preferred by farmers. The high relative importance values for frequency of message and source of information signify the value contained by the farmers for these two aspects.

Pages: 870-873  |  1161 Views  325 Downloads

Download (512KB)