Farmers’ Exposure to Development Communication Tools of Agriculture Information Service in Bangladesh

The development communication tools (DCTs) of Agriculture Information Service (AIS) plays important role in disseminating agricultural information. Farmers’ exposure to these DCTs of AIS influences higher crop production and better farm management. The main purpose of this study was to determine and describe the exposure of DCTs of AIS by the farmers in receiving agricultural information. The individual socioeconomic characteristic of the farmers has been explored from the study and the relationship between the exposure of respondents to DCTs of AIS and their selected characteristics has been determined too. Data were collected from randomly selected 80 farmers of five villages of Dumuria upazila under Khulna district, by using a structured interview schedule through personal interview. Appropriate Likert scales were used in order to measure the concerned variables. Spearman’s Ranked Correlation Coefficient (ρ) was used to test the relationship between the independent and dependent variables. The farmers were exposed to 13 out of 14 DCTs of AIS. However, majority (72.5 percent) of the respondents showed very low exposure to DCTs of AIS. The respondents were highly exposed to poster/sticker (65.93%), while they were less exposed to ICT laboratory (0.94%). Other important DCTs as exposed by the farmers were folder/leaflet/flipchart (64.69%), television program (54.06%), agricultural fair (50.93%) and AisTube (1.87%). Among 13 selected characteristics of the respondents’ level of education, farm size, annual family income, cosmopolitanism, innovativeness, extension contact, organizational participation, training, knowledge and attitude were positively correlated with their level of exposure to the DCTs of AIS. Half (50.00%) of the respondents confronted medium extent of problem and 43.75 percent confronted high extent of problem while a few of them (6.25%) reported low extent of problem for being exposed to the DCTs of AIS. Unavailability of personal mobile, TV, radio was the highly confronted problem (90.00%) followed by lack of resources (87.95%), internet (82.08%) and transportation facilities (78.30%) by the farmers in receiving agricultural information. The AIS authority could revise their policy for the improvement of DCTs on the basis of the findings from the current study.

Keywords: Farmers, Exposure, Development Communication Tools,Agriculture Information Service

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