Effective Components of Optimal Wheat Production from the Perspective of Farmers in the North of Khuzestan, Iran

Abstract

This research was carried out to investigate the role of legal, philosophical, economic, environmental, educational, and some personal characteristics in farmers' professionalism in the production of optimal wheat in the north of Khuzestan Province, Iran. The methodological approach in this research was casual relative and applied survey. The data were collected by a survey and a questionnaire as the main research instruments. The samples comprised all wheat growers in Northern Khuzestan. Three hundred and ten farmers were selected by using a Cochran's formula through random sampling out of 23,485 wheat farmers of Northern Khuzestan. Finally, 302 questionnaires were analyzed. The questionnaire was developed from a review of the related literature. The content and face validity of the instruments were established after several times of review and correction by the faculty members of Azad University of Garmsar. The questionnaire and data were analyzed by the help of the SPSS v21 software package. The reliability was reported to be 0.81 using Cronbach's alpha. Stepwise regression analysis indicated the most important variable that accounted for 77.2% of the variance of the dependent variable was the economic variable. The next variables (environmental, legal components, and educational attitudes and processes) captured 86.5% of the variance of optimal wheat production.