20 pages, Knowledge of agricultural practices has declined in recent years, resulting in consumers becoming uncertain of where and how their food has been produced and the marketing tactics used to promote the product. Historically, the U.S. population’s rich agricultural heritage coincided with higher levels of agricultural literacy. Some scholars, however, have maintained that U.S. culture has begun to lose touch with its agricultural foundations. More recent evidence has demonstrated that consumers acquire knowledge about their food from various media, most notably the Internet and social media. Often these sources use incorrect information and promote food and agricultural marketing trends that may not be grounded in scientific data. In response, this historical narrative analyzed a reform effort that occurred in U.S. food labeling policy and practice in the 1900s, which contributed to food labeling issues and consumer distrust in the agricultural industry. Based on the findings of this investigation, we concluded that food labels were initially intended to provide consumers with more profound knowledge of the food they purchased. However, key legislative acts such as the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act and the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act shifted the food labeling movement into a branding device to differentiate products and brands. We recommend that agricultural practitioners explore new ways to communicate their message more effectively. We also call for producers to incorporate more personal and emotional appeals when marketing agricultural products to better compete with third-party branding efforts.
23 pages, Poor uptake of agricultural innovations on weed management practices is a major factor responsible for low productivity. This paper examines how communication media can help improve farmers’ adoption behaviour.
14pgs, The World Health Organization (WHO) has used communication methods to promote the international ban of the agricultural pesticides paraquat, glyphosate and chlorpyrifos. This ban has led to misunderstanding among farmers who still use these chemicals, which may be available under different brand names. Communication with the non-scientific community is uncertain leading to miscommunication, especially where scientific language is used. Governments have banned the use of these agricultural chemicals. The scientific arguments are not necessarily understood by famers so they may ignore the prohibition and continue using them or other similar chemicals. This study uses story-telling and qualitative research methods where a questionnaire is combined with the content analytical technique. The quantitative research method was used to collect data in the field where 351 participants took part. Participatory action research is a method where community farmers engaged in self-reflection on the impact of chemicals on their fields, their health and the health of others. Their understanding of the non-chemical usage model and good agricultural practice farmers in the vicinity, especially as they were personally involved in the creation of the media from script preparation, to acting, filming, and evaluating the final docu-dramas. The findings of the docu–drama programmes of 5 GAP farmers are presented to identify the perception of how to avoid using chemicals and their solutions for tangerine farmers through a manual that is the media output from the project and the resulting findings suggesting that the factors related to the effectiveness of scientific communication are divided into pull factors and push factors.
15 pages, Trust is often an assumed outcome of participation in Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) as they directly connect producers with consumers. It is based on this potential for trust “between producers and consumers” that AFNs have emerged as a significant field of food studies analysis as it also suggests a capacity for AFNs to foster associated embedded qualities, like ‘morality’, ‘social justice’, ‘ecology’ and ‘equity’. These positive benefits of AFNs, however, cannot be taken for granted as trust is not necessarily an outcome of AFN participation. Using Chinese case studies of AFNs, which are characterised by a distinct form of trust pressure—consumers who are particularly cynical about small scale farmers, food safety and the organic credentials of producers—this paper highlights how the dynamics of trust are in constant flux between producers and consumers. I suggest that it is the careful construction of the aesthetic and multi-sensory qualities of food, which is often celebrated via social media, that human centred relations in Chinese AFNs are mediated. This leads to two key conclusions: first, that the key variable for establishing trust is satisfying the consumer’s desire for safe (i.e. "fresh") food; and second, the materiality of the food and the perception of foods materiality (especially through social media), must both be actively constructed by the farmer to fit the consumer’s ideal of freshness.
22 Pages., Consumers have varying levels of trust in agricultural production practices, which can influence attitudes, shift opinions, and change behaviors. The purpose of this study was to determine what agricultural messages are considered the most trustworthy among consumers and what differences exist among five dimensions of trustworthiness. With a pro-agriculture video as the stimulus, this study used continuous response measurement (CRM) to collect data from 151 post-secondary students who were randomly assigned to evaluate one of five trustworthiness dimensions (trust, honest, sincere, dependable, reliable). Participants used handheld dials to continuously rate their evaluation of the messages in the video then completed a questionnaire to provide additional insights. Overall, participants trusted agricultural messages, although some specific phrases were rated more positively than others. Participants had more trust in messages that portray agriculture as a family endeavor and create connection between producers and consumers. Participants indicated skepticism in messages revolving around farmer/rancher motivation in agriculture. The results support the importance of strategically tailoring and crafting effective messages. Recommendations for future practice and research are discussed.
Online from the publisher, Findings of a recent national telephone survey by the National Association of Farm Broadcasting (NAFB) indicated that most farmer respondents (71 percent) are listening to radio, and during an average of 4.7 days a week. The findings indicated that 65 percent listen to AM radio, 53 percent to FM radio, and less than 20 percent to satellite radio. Most radio listening takes place while driving or operating farm equipment, 82 percent while driving a pickup and 64 percent while operating farm equipment.
Online from publisher. 2 pages., Advice to young journalists. "As a professional, you have to be better than only an instagram post writer. You must consciously and intentionally develop your skills of conversation. Sit down with your granny and ask her about her life as a young girl. Find out what your papaw was really thinking and feeling as he stepped onto some faraway battlefield as a terrified kid. And when you interview that farmer or lineman or craftsperson for your Co-op's publication, find out why they do what they do, not just what they do."
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 202 Document Number: D12107
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Online from Precision Reach, Eden Prairie, Minnesota. 4 pages., An agriculture-focused communications firm reports seeing "a significant increase in CTV farmer audiences as well as CTV advertising campaigns." Authors list 10 reasons why agri-marketers should consider CTV in their marketing mix.
15 pages, Generalized trust, which refers to trust towards people that are not well known (Yamagishi and Yamagishi, 1994; Stolle, 2002; Uslaner, 2002; Freitag and Traunmüller, 2009), is needed for many situations of economic interaction such as daily market activities. Considering that trust acts as a lubricant for social interaction, a lack of generalized trust can severely restrict a persons reach of efficient economic exchange. Increases of generalized trust within a society thus have the potential to create large efficiency gains (Fafchamps and Minten, 2002; Fafchamps, 2006).
Given the importance of trust for social interaction and various welfare dimensions, a growing body of economic, sociological, and psychological research has been devoted to examining the circumstances under which trust can thrive. A reoccurring notion in all three disciplines is that communication represents a key factor in the formation of trust (Lewicki et al., 2006; Glanville and Paxton, 2007). Ostrom et al. (1992), for example, find that communication and sanctioning in a common pool resource experiment lead to substantially more efficient outcomes. In a laboratory setting, personal communication has shown to enhance trust (Buchan et al., 2006), and is even more powerful in creating mutually benefitting exchanges than the possibility to engage in non-binding contracts (Ben-Ner and Putterman, 2009).
In this paper, we analyze whether mobile phones which constitute a fundamental component of modern information and communications technologies (ICT) can help build social trust among pastoral communities in Northern Kenya.1 In most African countries, trust levels are remarkably low; out of all regions in the world, people living in sub-Sahara Africa exhibit the lowest levels of generalized trust (Mattes and Moreno, 2018). In the study region of Northern Kenya, it is particularly relevant to increase trust for several reasons. First, the relatively weak legal system jeopardizes contract enforcement, which means that any economic interaction requires substantial amounts of trust between the contract partners. This has caused a strong reliance on trust-based relationships in Northern Kenyas livestock sector (Mahmoud, 2008; Pavanello, 2010; Roba et al., 2018). Furthermore, low trust levels between ethnic tribes have also reinforced longstanding intertribal conflicts in the region, and impede solutions to share resources peacefully and effectively (Schilling et al., 2012). Lastly, the low population density and long physical distances between settlements in the region make communication over long distances difficult and therefore induce high monitoring costs. Potential benefits of enhancing trust are therefore particularly high in the context of Northern Kenya.
To compensate for physical remoteness, rural communities have a high need for digital connectivity but have oftentimes suffered from poor connection and inclusion in existing networks in the past (Salemink et al., 2017). Over the last decade, however, mobile phones have become available to most pastoralists in Northern Kenya (Butt, 2015; Asaka and Smucker, 2016; Parlasca et al., 2020). A large and growing body of research has pointed out that mobile phones can help increase several paramount welfare dimensions of rural populations in sub-Saharan Africa, such as income and income equality, financial development, gender equality, or institutional quality (Aker and Mbiti, 2010; Asongu, 2015; Asongu and Nwachukwu, 2016; Rotondi et al., 2020). However, the research on the implications of mobile phones on social capital formation is much less extensive. To the best of our knowledge, the potential of mobile phones to affect trust is so far solely based on qualitative or anecdotal evidence (Molony, 2006, 2009; Overå, 2006) and lacks quantitative assessments. This paper aims to close this gap.
In this study, we elicit trust levels with an incentivized experiment, namely the canonical trust game by Berg et al. (1995). Experimental sessions were conducted from July 2018 to August 2018 in 17 different villages in Turkana County, Northern Kenya, and included a total of 402 respondents. We differentiate with regard to the object of trust by measuring trust towards fellow villagers, trust towards people from a neighboring village, and trust towards city dwellers from the county capital. Past research in rural sub-Saharan Africa indicates that smallholder farmers exhibit less trust towards people from different villages (Etang, 2010; Etang et al., 2011) or people from the next larger city (Parlasca et al., 2019). The differentiation of the object of trust therefore allows investigating heterogeneous effects of mobile phone use on trust depending on the physical distance between trustor and trustee.
This research adds add to the existing literature in several ways: to the extent of our knowledge, this is the first study to explore the direct link between mobile phone use and trust using quantitative household data from a low-income country. Thus far, no study has analyzed the role of geographical distance in the relationship between mobile phone use and trust. Lastly, this analysis contributes to the extremely sparse literature on trust in the context of pastoralist communities in sub-Saharan Africa.
The remainder of the study is organized as follows. Section 2 lays out the conceptual framework that guides the analysis. The data are explained in section 3 and the empirical framework is presented in section 4. The results are discussed section 5, followed by concluding remarks in section 6.
