11 pages., This paper was initiated in order to find the usage and relevance of theInformation and Communication Technologies(ICT) by the smallholder farmers of the Umzimvubu Local Municipality of the Eastern Cape Province in South Africa. A survey questionnaire was then developed to collect the relevant data from randomly selected six villages of Umzimvubu Local Municipality targeting 138 respondents. The questionnaires structure employed both closed and open-ended questions that were administered using a face to face interview, conducted on the sample population in each village. There seems to be a correlation between ICT usage and the economies of scale in agricultural development, where smallholder farmers tend to use less of highly modernized ICT, while commercial large scale farmers use more of the modernized ICT. This disparity amongst farmers is exacerbated in many areas by the differing support systems employed by the public extension services.
19 pages., Via online journal., This project’s primary purpose was to identify and describe the leadership styles and skills emphases of current Kansas agricultural organization chief executive officers. Twenty-three current CEOs participated and were described in terms of their leadership styles, leadership-skills emphases, and demographics. Overall, they appeared to be rather “middle of the road” on each of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire’s nine leadership scales. Leadership styles were not significantly affected by demographics, with the exception of formal leadership training affecting transactional leadership and education level, organizational category, and staff size affecting passive-avoidant leadership. Participants generally rated the 50 leadership skills as important. Leadership styles did not significantly affect the skill emphases. In evaluating CEO candidates, an agricultural organization should design its process to gauge leadership styles and skills separately because, according to this project, they do not predict each other. Once a new CEO is hired, a formal leadership-training program should emphasize the transformational style over the transactional and, more so, passive-avoidant while still maintaining an appropriate balance between transformational and transactional.
