Study on the role of agricultural production cooperatives in promoting farmers’ technical knowledge: a case study of sugar beet growers in Fars Province, Iran

A strength of agricultural production cooperatives is improving the technical knowledge of their members which is along with their function in large-scale development. One of the main obstacles to the success of cooperatives is their inability in improving the technical knowledge of their members. The current study evaluates the role of production cooperatives of Fars province, Iran in improving sugar beet growers' technical knowledge level. Questionnaire was used for information collection. The questionnaire was validated after some revisions following consulting with professionals and experts. To realize the reliability of the question-naire, Cronbach's coefficient α was calculated as to be in the range of 0.71-0.82 for different sections of the questionnaire which was a proof of its high reliability. The data were collected from 148 questionnaires filled out by member and non-member sugar beet growers in production cooperatives. The farmers were selected by multi-stage stratified random sampling method. Factorial analysis of variance was used for analyzing the data. Results showed that personal factors including literacy level, age and field size did not impact farmers' technical knowledge improvement. Furthermore, membership in cooperatives did not by itself affect technical knowledge improvement, whereas the effect of region and the interaction between region and membership in cooperatives were significant on farmers' technical knowledge level. However, using extension services was not the reason for the superiority of sugar beet growers' technical knowledge index in different cities. Therefore, the driving force of extension services did not efficiently work in improving technical knowledge level in all cities.