Attitude of farmers towards farmer producer organization in Patan block of Jabalpur district (M.P)

Introduction

Agriculture is at the centre of India's economy, and it accounts for approximately 69 percent of the population's livelihood. It also accounts for 15 percent of the entire country's export earnings. It is no surprise that India is known as the "land of agriculture". Farmers' producer organisations (FPOs) are institutions of small and marginal farmers. These organisations help farmers to improve their income through sustainable and profitable farming and also help in creating knowledge and skills among farmers to take informed decisions. Most FPOs take a value chain-centric approach to farming. FPOs have been promoted in India since the year 2006. Over the years, it has seen large participation from farmer and expert communities. Today, there are more than 5000 FPOs in the country. An FPO (Farmer Producer Organisation) is an object or institution formed by farmers with the aim of ensuring better income and livelihoods by improving their bargaining power, accessing inputs at lower costs, and collectively marketing their produce. These organizations are typically registered under relevant laws in their respective countries and operate as cooperatives or companies owned and managed by farmers themselves. Farmer Producer Organizations play five potential roles in strengthening markets for commodities produced, bought, and sold by smallholders reducing transaction costs managing risk, building social capital, enabling collective action and redressing missing markets. The creation of countervailing power, access to capital markets on favourable terms, risk management, and income improvements are other major reasons for establishing farmers' organizations (Datta, 2004) [4] . Every human being holds thousands of attitudes, including those about family and friends, political figures, abortion rights, terrorism, preferences for music, and much more. Each of our attitudes has its own unique characteristics, and no two attitudes come to us or influence us in quite the same way. Research has found that some of our attitudes are inherited, at least in part, via genetic transmission from our parents (Olson, Vernon, Harris, & Jang, 2001) [11] . Other attitudes are learned mostly through direct and indirect experiences with the attitude objects (De Houwer, Thomas, & Baeyens, 2001) [5] . We may like to ride roller coasters in part because our genetic code has given us a thrill-loving personality and in part because we've had some really great times on roller coasters in the past. Still other attitudes are learned via the media (Hargreaves & Tiggemann, 2003; Levina, Waldo, & Fitzgerald, 2000) [8,9] or through our www.extensionjournal.com interactions with friends (Poteat, 2007) [12] . Some of our attitudes are shared by others (most of us like sugar, fear snakes, and are disgusted by cockroaches), whereas other attitudes-such as our preferences for different styles of music or art-are more individualized. In their influential book The Psychology of Attitudes, Eagly and Chaiken defines an attitude as 'a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favour or disfavour'. Inherent in this definition is the idea that reporting an attitude involves the expression of an evaluative judgement about a stimulus object. In other words, reporting an attitude involves making a decision concerning liking vs. disliking, approving vs. disapproving or favouring vs. disfavouring a particular issue, object or person. Attitudes are the established ways of responding to people and situations that have been learned, based on the beliefs, values and assumptions that a person hold. The attitude defines how fast a person achieves a goal or how well acquires skills and knowledge. Attitudes also provide a sort of framework to solve the problem of employees. Getting success at anything employees need to have right mindset. Their body language is a result of their mental attitude. When a person comes in that mood will reflect a message that everyone understands consciously or unconsciously. A person's attitude is the first thing that the other person will pick up in one to one communication. It is not what happens to a person that counts. It is how that person react to what happens to that person, especially when a person has unexpected problems of any kind. Employees can learn and master powerful strategies for keeping themselves thinking positively and creatively. This will help them in increasing positive attitude. An employee with positive attitude can create a healthy atmosphere in the organization. Keeping the above points of reference in view a study entitled -"Attitude of Farmers towards Farmer Producer Organization in Patan block of Jabalpur district (M.P)" was conducted with the premise that it would help in understanding the role of different variables that influence attitude formation.

Materials and Methods

An ex-post-facto research was conducted in the purposively selected Patan block of Jabalpur district of Madhya Pradesh as the FPO named Ma Reva Kisan Utpadak Producer Company Limited, Patan which had the most active members was located there. Five villages were randomly chosen from a cluster of villages where the FPO members resided. 24 farmers were randomly chosen from each selected village thus resulting in the sample size 120 farmers who were also members of the above FPO. The scale developed by Singh (2023) [3] was used to measure attitude of farmers (who were also members of FPO) towards FPO (Ma Reva Kisan Utpadak Producer Company Limited, Patan). The scale consisted of 16 statements. The responses were recorded on a five-point continuum ranging from strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree and strongly disagree. The positive statements were scored 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 for strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree and strongly disagree and for negative statements, the scoring was reversed. The final score was worked out by summing scores obtained by respondent for all statements. The researchers interviewed the farmers in the sample one on one. Personal interviews were used to obtain the data using a structured interview schedule specially designed for the study. All 120 respondents were contacted, and all necessary information was acquired. Establishing rapport with respondents is crucial for obtaining accurate and appropriate responses during interviews. All respondents were properly informed of the study's importance and aims before to the interview.

The following statistical tools were applied in the analysis:

Percentage analysis

The term percentage refers to a fraction with a denominator of 100 and a numerator that is called a percentage. To calculate the percentage, frequency was multiplied by 100 and divided by the total number of respondents. Formula is

Where, P = Percentage F = Frequency of respondents N = Total number of respondents

Frequency

Frequency can be defined as the occurrence of data at frequent intervals.

Pearson's correlation (r)

The coefficient of correlation measures the degree and direction of a linear relationship between two variables. It is calculated by dividing the sample covariance by the product of the sample standard deviations. The coefficient of correlation values vary between -1.00 and +1.00. It is observed from the distribution in Table 1 that, 45.84 per cent of the respondents had moderately favourable attitude towards farmers' producer organization followed by 36.66 per cent and 17.50 per cent of the respondents who had highly favourable and less favourable attitude towards farmers' producer organization, respectively.

Results

Attitude of members towards Farmer's Producer Organization

As a result, it may be concluded that all farmers had a favourable view toward the FPO. This positive attitude of farmers towards FPOs can be attributed to the fact that all families within the village are aware of the concept of FPO before beginning the work of establishing FPO, farmer respondents observing and realising the pivotal role played by the FPO in the upliftment of the FPO members, and the general facilities and services rendered by the FPO in a professional manner.

Discussion

Regarding attitude of farmers towards FPOs it can be seen that a considerable majority 0f farmers who were interviewed had moderately favourable to favourable attitude towards FPOs. Somewhat similar results have been reported by Majinder et al (2021) [10] . As regards 0.05 level of significance, it connotes that if the survey/ analysis is done/ repeated 100 times under similar conditions than there is 5 per cent chance of error in results i.e. 95 times similar results will be obtained as above. Similarly, 0.01 level of significance connotes that if the survey/ analysis is done/ repeated 100 times under similar conditions than there is 1 per cent chance of error in results i.e. 99 times similar results will be obtained as above.

Conclusion

It may be concluded that most of the members of FPO had favourable attitude towards farmer producer organizations and the variables gender, education, annual income, decision making ability, achievement motivation, social participation, social media and training had positive and significant relationship with attitude of farmers towards FPOs.

References

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