Investigating Factors Affecting the Wheat Farmers Attitudes towards Organic Agriculture in Khodabandeh Township

In recent years, focusing on organic agriculture has been emphasized because of the negative effect of conventional agriculture. Any persuading planning of farmers to use organic agriculture methods requires investigating their current attitude toward organic agriculture. The main purpose of this descriptive-correlational study was to investigate effective factors on farmer's attitude towards organic agriculture. The statistical population consisted of all wheat farmers in Khodabande township (N= 24350) of them 275 were identified based on Cochran’s formula and through a stratified randomized sampling method. The research tool was a researcher-made questionnaire which its validity was verified by a panel of experts in the related field and to check its reliability, a Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient was calculated 0.78. The results showed that the attitude of the majority of respondents (50.9 percent) towards organic farming was at the neutral level and the attitude of 49.1 percent was positive. Correlation analysis revealed that age, family household number and experience had a negative meaningful correlation with farmers’ attitude but education, income and acquaintance with organic farming had a positive meaningful correlation. Comparison analysis showed that there were significant differences between the farmers’ attitude towards organic agriculture based on groups of different cultivation method, using of pesticide and Herbicide. In addition, logistic regression analysis indicated that 46.5 of farmer's attitude explained by three variables named as farmer’s experience, their acquaintance with organic farming and income.