Relative Effects of Mediating and Independent Factors on Farmers' Acceptance to Pay for Public Extension Visits

The study investigated the relative effects of mediating and independent factors on farmers' acceptance to contribute towards the delivery of more public extension farm visits as needed by those who can afford to pay. This investigation in South Africa, was motivated by the fact that most public extension organizations, especially, in developing countries, operate on inadequate budgets. Adoption behaviour studies, therefore, need to be as cost-efficient as possible by focusing on the factors that make a significant contribution to our understanding of the issue at hand. A semi-structured, self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data from 97 medium and small-scale crop farmers in the Free State Province of South Africa, from 1 September to 7 October 2010. Non-probability sampling techniques were employed to select respondents. The results show that the mediating variables, more than the independent variables, significantly influenced farmers' acceptance to pay for the delivery of public extension farm visits. Need tension, especially, the difference between aspired and present situations regarding practice adoption and production efficiency, made the most individual contributions to the variation in farmers' acceptance to pay for the delivery of public extension farm visits. Adoption behaviour analysis could, therefore, be focused on a limited number of mediating variables in adoption surveys. This focused approach on the more direct precursors of behaviour in adoption investigations offers opportunities for a more rigorous assessment of the relevant mediating variables which can be changed compared to the more static independent variables. Furthermore, this approach has time and cost-saving implications for extension organizations by reducing the size of the survey questionnaire. Another implication of the results of this study is that Extension theory is richer because the framework for adoption behaviour analysis that was used to analyze the respondents’ acceptance to pay for farm visits, continues to yield consistent results.