Investigating the Viewpoints of Farmers of Markazi District of Karaj towards Participation in Community Supported Agriculture

This correlational-survery research was conducted with the main objective of investigating viewpoints of farmers of Markazi district of Karaj towards participation in community supported agriculture. The statistical population of the study consisted of farmers in Markazi district of Karaj (N=1598) out of which 117 people were selected as sample using Cochran Formula. In order to enhance the representativeness of the sample, finally the sample size was increased upto 130 farmers. simple random sampling was apllied for the study. The tool of study was a questionnaire which was validated by getting judgment of some experts (faculty members of the Department of agricultural Extension and Education in the university of Tehran). In order to estimate the reliability of the different scales of the questionnaire, Cronbach Alpha coefficient was used. The values ranged from 0.7 to 0.9 which indicated that the tool of study was reliable. The data were analyzed by SPSS-Win. The findings showed that the main motivation of the farmers for participation in community-supported agriculture was to securing financial sources and marketing of their produces. The results of correlation analysis revealed that there were significant positive relationships between the level of interest to receive citizen's financial support with the variables viz., annual income, family labor use and the numbers of citizen's visits to farms at 1 percent level. The same variable was significantly and positively correlated with dependency to residential area and educational level at 5 % level. In addition, the results of Kruskal Wallis test indicated that there were significance differences among different categories of farmers from various residential areas in terms of interest to receive citizen's financial support and tendency to cooperate with citizens of diverse income level, satisfaction level of farming income and the length of plantation at 5 % level.