JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION AND EDUCATION RESEARCH
Year:2016 | Volume:9 | Issue:1 (33)|Papers Count:9

Due to ecological problems and urgent need to food security, the time has come to pay attention to organic farming in order to improve food security in Iran. The objective of this study was designing an organic agricultural model in improving food security from Fars province agricultural experts' perception. The present research was practical in terms of purpose, and descriptive (non-experimental) in term of data gathering and in terms of research methodology was descriptive-correlation. The statistical population of this research included 110 members of agriculture and plant breeding experts of agricultural Jihad organization which census sampling method was conducted. A questionnaire was developed to collect data. Validity of the questionnaire confirmed by experts and reliability was measured by using Cronbach alpha coefficient and (0.724-0.949) was estimated by the SPSSV16 software. The results indicated that food security was in the low level (%65.5). The standardized regression coefficients showed that income creation capability (0.507), capacity building capability (0.491) and employment capability of organic farming (0.423) were consider as the most effective capability in improving food security. Duo to this result, applied research and long term planning in these dimensions of organic farming, should be implemented.

Economy of developing countries is mostly based on agricultural products that these agricultural activities occurred in rural areas. According to this fact, applying major activities, programs and strategies are required to pave the road of agricultural development as a pole of national development, in the rural management. The purpose of research is identification of factors affecting the management structure model for rural development. The research is descriptive and analytical survey among rural population include of councils, government agencies and trustees local agricultural service centers in three provinces of Fars, Isfahan, Mazandaran that they was asked by questionnaire. as results of research, the structural equation model was confirms. also Factors affecting the management of rural development were including rural management aspects, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The result showed that these components could efficient When some factors such as structural guidelines and criteria of management, implementation of tasks in state and local rural agencies are considered.

Teaching agricultural education and extension as an academic field has about 50 years old history in Iran. In addition to direct extension activities, researchers and professionals of this field have tried to conduct many worthy research activities during this time. However, examination of Iranian contributions is a subject that has not been considered seriously. The present research aims to study global scientific productions of Iranian researchers in the field of agricultural education and extension as reflected in Scopus database. For this propose, all related papers have been searched over Scopus citation database without time limitations and then, the search results have been analyzed using scientometrics approach. The results show that about 216 papers have been produced by Iranian researchers of the field during 1982 to 2016. The average annual growth of the papers is 6.8 percent based on geometric mean. In addition, about 65 percent of papers have been produced by 2 or 3 authors and just 15.7 percent of the papers have had one author. Furthermore, Tehran, Islamic Azad (science and research branch), and Shiraz universities have the most portion in support of scientific productions in this field. Finally, these 216 papers have been cited 398 times totally among which the published papers in 2010 have received the most citations.

In this study we have investigated barriers to the development of rural tourism-related businesses in the Ryjab area by using Grounded Theory. Research population consisted 28 Community residents, and business owners. The research data were collected by using semi-structured interview in the form of three coding stage i.e. open coding; axial coding and selective coding were analyzed and classified in the form of ten main problems. included: 1) Poor planning and lack of financial supports, credit and legal support by government, 2) Degradation and pollution of natural resources and environment, 3) Lack of facilities and infrastructure of residential, entertainment, sports, health, 4) lack of processing manufacture for horticultural and agricultural products, 5) Seasonality of tourism businesses, 6) lack of incentive, constraints – capital and lack of risk of the business owners in the entrepreneurial and diversification of jobs, 7) Social restrictions in the host communities, 8) Unfavorable geographic and climatic conditions, 9) Inform and advertising restrictions, and 10) Culture barriers.

Although the notion of entrepreneurial alertness is considered as a basic concept in entrepreneurial opportunism theory, providing a scale for measuring it has been addressed less specifically in Iran. Thus, this casual- effect study conducted for validating this instrument. The statistical population of the study was consisted of agricultural graduates working in commercial agricultural companies in South of Kerman province (N=346) among which 132 people were chosen according to Cochran formula and proportional sampling method. A Likert- type standard questionnaire was the study instrument. The examination of divergent validity of instrument revealed its reliability and validity. The main statistical method was second order confirmatory factor analysis that showed that entrepreneurial alertness is consisted of three dimensions i.e. scanning and search, association and connection and evaluation and judgment and the hypothesis of uni-dimensionality was not supported. Furthermore, results revealed that association and connection dimension has more contribution in comparison with two other dimensions. In total, the results showed that opportunism in entrepreneurship as outlined by Kirzner, existed among Iranian entrepreneurs and this notion is essentially both intrinsic and acquisitive.

The purpose of this research was to evaluate the quality of IPM/FFS training courses based on QFD method among orchardists of Illam Province. Also, as part of the QFD study, a need assessment survey was conducted to extract the educational needs of target group based on Borich model. The study population consisted of all the northern grape and pomegranate growers participated in the IPM/FFS training courses (N=420). A sample of 201 persons was selected through a simple random sampling manner. To collect data, a questionnaire was administered which its validity and reliability were confirmed. The second part of needed data was gathered by conducting an interview with extension specialists. Data analysis was performed using SSPSV20 and Edraw maxv20 software. The completed QFD chart was revealed that both of the “seeking ideas regarding the satisfaction of IPM/FFS training courses” and “holding classes in accordance with the principles of adult education and facilitation” were identified as the most relevant service characteristics to the participants’ needs, by showing the absolute and relative weight of 502.11, 8.64 and 469.35, 8.07, respectively. This means that these two service characteristics showed a significant impact on addressing the participants’ needs. Among the service characteristics, “promotion of interest to use substitute solutions” and “seeking ideas regarding the satisfaction of IPM/FFS courses” had strong positive relationship with almost others. At last, the study followed by some suggestions to better implementing the IPM/FFS training courses.