Summarizes findings of a 2019 survey among U.S. farmers regarding their daily information sources for farming, agricultural news, weather and markets. "Even as new information sources appear and some farmers partake in them, traditional farm-news sources like radio continue to show broad-based strength."
26 pages, Agricultural productive services are an important means to achieve effective allocation of regional resources and play an important role in ensuring food security and improving farmers’ welfare. However, the development process of agricultural productive services still faces problems such as large differences in service levels in different segments and low participation rates in the full service. In order to investigate the influential paths of the low participation rate of farmers in the full-service process, this study takes maize farmers in northeast China as the research object. Based on 937 survey data from six cities in three northeastern provinces, we used the Item Response Theory (IRT) model to measure farmers’ information acquisition ability and constructed the Heckman two-stage model and the IV-Heckman model to analyze the logical framework of “information acquisition ability—farmers’ choice of productive agricultural services”. The main findings are as follows: firstly, the more channels there are, the stronger the farmers’ channel internalities; the higher the degree of channel differentiation, the stronger the farmers’ channel internalities. Second, after addressing the sample selection bias and endogeneity, there is a small rise in the facilitation effect of information acquisition ability on farmers’ productive agricultural service behavior. Third, this facilitation effect is achieved through farmers’ perceived usefulness of productive agricultural services, and the mediating effect of perceived ease of use is not significant. Therefore, fostering farmers’ self-perceptions and optimizing information delivery strategies are effective ways to promote farmers’ choice of agricultural productive services and to facilitate the modernization of Chinese agriculture. In general, this study helps to reveal the theoretical mechanism of farmers’ information asymmetry, and provides empirical evidence for how to promote the development of agricultural productive services.
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."
