Analyzing the Mental Schemas of Agricultural Actors in Choosing the Types of Crops: Applying Grey Relational Approach

Choosing crop pattern highly depends on mental schemas of the production actors. Therefore, analysis of these schemas is an essential step in organizing agricultural production in Iran. Hence, the purpose of the present study was to analyze the farmers’ and agricultural managers’ mental schemas in selecting the cropping pattern in the South of Sistan and Baluchestan province, using a descriptive-analytical method. For this purpose, first, the actors of agricultural sector were identified in Chabahar and Sarbaz Counties. Then, farmers’ and managers’ concepts for selecting farm planning were identified. Afterwards, the importance of these concepts were determined through Gray Theory. Finally, the combinations of farmers’ and managers’ concepts were clustered using a Hierarchical Dendrogram. The findings showed that the highest level of the score of crop planning concepts are related to crop profitability (0.962), optimum level of life (0.763) and production increase (0.773), respectively. Also, in this study, the classification of crop planning concepts highlights the importance of using “supportive levers” to improve crop planning in the studied area. Based on the results, it is clear that a comprehensive agricultural management system is required for "planning", "dynamic management", and "the way of farmers’ interaction with related organizations". Such infrastructure will reduce or eliminate the inefficient situation of information in terms of dispersion, multiplicity, inconsistency, incoherence, and etc; and ultimately confound decision makers.