The Effective Factors on the Adoption of Biological Control in Farmers' Field School by Rice Producers: The Case of Babol Township

The main purpose of this research is to determine the effective factors in adopting biological control in the Farmer Field School approach. The method used in this research is descriptive-correlation and comparative, which has been done by survey. The rice farmers of the township of Babol, Mazandaran, Iran were selected as the sample population of this research. The statistical sample of the research was 472 which included 92 rice farmers who attended the Farmer Field School and 380 people who did not participate in this course The designed questionnaire, after some modifications according to the corresponding experts’ opinion, was distributed between the two groups of rice farmers. At last, 433 collected questionnaires were analyzed by SPSS software (81 of the rice farmers who participated and 352 of them that did not participate). The findings show that the independent variables of rice farmer's attitude toward to biological control, use of information sources and knowledge of biological control determine 85.5% of the changes in the dependent variable of adopting biological control.

Farmer Field School, Adoption, Biological Control, Rice Farmers