Mobile-based advisory services for sustainable agriculture: Assessing farmers’ information behavior

Abstract

Mobile-based advisory services have significant benefits, including access to agricultural information, knowledge sharing, meteorological information, marketing-related information, and financial services for smallholder farmers. This study aimed to assess farmers’ information behavior regarding mobile-based advisory services and how farmers with different characteristics and attitudes access and adopt information. Data were collected from 382 farmers in Dakhalia governorate, Egypt. The most frequently received information was related to best agricultural practices, weather forecasts, seed varieties and treatment, and water management. Cluster analysis revealed that 47% of the farmers had low information behavior. Seventy-one of the respondents had a favorable attitude toward information retrieval from mobile agricultural services. The information behavior groups of the farmers significantly differed in education, farm size, diversity of agricultural production, and attitude regarding trust and quality of the information provided. Information behavior among farmers has useful implications for policymakers in supporting the long-term benefits of mobile-based advisory services.

Development of a Scale to Remove Farmers’ Sustainability Barriers to Meteorological Information in Iran

“…Krell et al [32] stated that political considerations and weakness of the infrastructures are of the main limitations for adaptive responses of the farming communities against the climate change impacts. Similar findings have been reported by the researchers from other countries including Zambia [52] and Egypt [53]. To be specific, most of these studies suggest that, in order to provide easier and better meteorological information to farmers, first, inter-institutional cooperation between stakeholders should be increased.…”

“…These researchers, however, suggest that educated farmers can be a turning point to change these negative perspectives towards weather information. Kassem et al [53] reported similar results for the adoption of climate-related predictions in Egypt. Salite [55] also introduced the tradition and negative attitude towards new climate prediction systems as one of the main limiting factors of applying weather services in Mozambique.…”

“…Taken together, the normative barriers in the context of such studies refer to erroneous and institutionalized norms of meteorological information usage in some agricultural communities. This problem has been reported as a major obstacle, especially in most developing and underdeveloped countries, see [1,53,55]. Sharifzadeh et al [1], in an actor-network analysis of weather information in Iran, revealed that social norms of farming communities have negative impacts on the adoption of these services.…”

Mobile Marketing in Business Sustainability: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…The United States dominates the list with 95 documents and 2419 citations, followed by England (26) with 820 citations. China has published 48 documents with 564 citations, followed by the Canada (8), Australia (13), Taiwan (17), Germany (16), Turkey (21), Netherlands (6), and South Korea (22). This data can provide a benchmark for mobile marketingrelated research for other countries.…”

“…In addition, mobile marketing strategy also can be incorporated with environmental studies such as weather [16] and also in agriculture business [17]. For mobile marketing in weather, mobile marketing can provide information for the customers about the weather conditions before making their purchase.…”