Factors Affecting Pro-environmental Behavior of Wheat Producers in Buokan Township, Iran

Today, with the arrival of chemical inputs in agriculture and excessive use of these inputs by farmers, irreparable damage has been done to the environment. Environmental sustainability included actions in line with environment in a long-term period. The use of long-term is due to environmental sustainability. This study was designed to investigate factors affecting environmental behavior of wheat producers and it was done by a survey technique. The research population included all wheat producers in the Buokan Township (5473 people) and 136 of them were selected by using Krejcie and Morgan (1970) sampling Table. The sampling method was proportional stratified random sampling. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) via the LISREL software was used to evaluate validity and reliability of the research questionnaire. The results of confirmatory factor analysis confirm both "the validity and reliability" of the questionnaire and "the goodness of the latent variables". The results of structural equation modeling (SEM) showed that most of the research hypotheses were confirmed and the “institutional” construct has the most effect on the environmental behavior and 35 percent of the variance change is explained by this construct. On the other hand, factors Economic, Ecological and Social have been mentioned as important in affecting environmental behavior.