A scale to measure the entrepreneurial capacities of turmeric growers in farmer producer organisations

Introduction

Turmeric ranks among India's key spice crops, with the nation leading in global production, consumption and export of this crop. India represents an impressive 75% to 80% of worldwide turmeric production, farming more than 2.92 lakh hectares to yield between 1.06 million and 1.19 million metric tonnes each year (Spices Board of India, the Ministry of Commerce). Within the country, it functions as its principal consumer, consuming approximately 80% to 85% of its overall production to satisfy strong culinary and industrial needs. Even with this significant domestic use, India continues to be the top global supplier, maintaining a 62% to 66% share of the world's export value. In the past fiscal years, India exported between 1.56 lakh to 1.73 lakh metric tonnes of the "golden spice," earning $333 million to $413 million in yearly export revenue and accounting for roughly 7% of the overall spice export income for the country. At the farm level, however, adoption of recommended turmeric practices lags behind growers' knowledge of them (Gayathri et al., 2025) [1] and growers report a range of perceived constraints (Sahoo et al., 2023) [2] . Farmer Producer Organisations (FPOs) were established in India to assist small and marginal farmers in overcoming scale disadvantages through the aggregation of produce, inputs and bargaining strength (NABARD, 2020) [3] . Membership has been associated with higher income, savings, social participation and empowerment of members (Banik et al., 2024; Sahoo et al., 2024; Lephansha et al., 2025) [4,5,6] , although members' knowledge of their own FPO is often only moderate (Dalei et al., 2025) [7] . An FPO, however, relies entirely on the abilities of its members. Cooperative marketing or processing initiatives thrive when participants establish objectives for their individual farms, embrace better techniques, make prompt choices and engage actively in collective endeavors. A member who sits back and waits for the organization to take action contributes very little. Bairagya et al. (2026) [8] , for instance, found the entrepreneurial behaviour of members to be one of the main drivers of branding effectiveness in FPOs. Recognizing the entrepreneurial abilities of each member is thus essential for enhancing the organization as a whole. Research on entrepreneurship has historically regarded innovativeness, proactivity and risk-taking as central elements of an entrepreneurial attitude (Covin & Slevin, 1989; Lumpkin & Dess, 1996; Chandra et al., 2026) [10, 11, 9] . Research on farmers in India has broadened this concept to personal behavior, incorporating characteristics like achievement motivation, decision-making skills, self-assurance, managerial competence, leadership qualities and the application of feedback ( [13,14,12,15] . Recent tools have concentrated on companies or on agricultural cooperatives as a unit. For instance, Shukla et al. (2026) [16] assessed the entrepreneurial orientation of FPOs involved in secondary agriculture. What is still absent is a tool that assesses the abilities of the individual grower, centered on the specifics of one commodity and the grower's connections with an FPO. The present study was therefore undertaken to develop and standardise a scale for assessing the entrepreneurial capacities of turmeric farmers of FPOs in Andhra Pradesh. The document outlines the process of creating and filtering the item pool, discusses the relevance and item evaluations and provides proof of the final instrument's reliability and validity.

Methodology

Entrepreneurial capacity referred to a turmeric grower's ability and eagerness to recognize and chase opportunities, assume calculated risks, implement and modify enhanced practices, make informed farming decisions, manage resources effectively, learn from feedback, take initiative within the FPO and resolve issues in turmeric production and marketing. The construct was divided into nine dimensions: achievement motivation, risk-taking ability, innovativeness, decisionmaking ability, self-confidence, managerial ability, feedback utilisation, leadership ability and problem-solving ability. The summated rating technique (Likert, 1932) [17] was chosen because each dimension is expressed through attitudes and self-reported behaviour that respondents can rate on a graded continuum.

Generation and editing of the item pool

Statements were drafted from a review of the literature regarding entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial behavior of farmers and existing measurement scales developed for farmers (Jaryal et al., 2024; Sawandkar et al., 2026; Shukla et al., 2026) [18,19,16] . They were supplemented by informal discussions with extension personnel, subject-matter specialists and FPO functionaries familiar with turmeric cultivation in the study area. This resulted in 124 statements. Each was evaluated based on the informal guidelines for attitude statements established by Edwards (1957) [20]: one idea per statement, straightforward language, avoidance of double negatives, exclusion of factual assertions and no items likely to be supported by nearly everyone or no one. Ambiguous, duplicated, or overlapping statements were rephrased or eliminated, resulting in 90 statements for expert evaluation. Both positively and negatively phrased statements were kept to reduce acquiescent responses. Negative items are scored in reverse for the final instrument.

Relevancy test

The 90 statements were sent to one hundred and ten experts in agricultural extension and allied disciplines working in state agricultural universities, ICAR institutes and development agencies. Each expert rated every statement on a three-point continuum: Most Relevant (3), Relevant (2) and Irrelevant (1). Experts were also invited to suggest rewording, additions or deletions. Completed schedules were received from 53 judges within one month (response rate 48.2%). For each statement, the relevancy weightage (R W ) and mean relevancy score (M RS ) were computed as follows:

Item analysis

The 59 relevant statements were presented to sixty FPO member farmers in Visakhapatnam district, Andhra Pradesh and were noted on a five-point scale from strongly agree (5) to strongly disagree (1), with scoring inverted for negative statements. Respondents were ordered by overall score and the top and bottom 27 percent (16 respondents each) constituted the high and low groups (Kelley, 1939) [21] . The critical ratio for every statement was calculated as:

Where n = 16 respondents in each group. Statements with t ≥ 1.75 were retained.

Reliability and validity

Cronbach's alpha was used to evaluate internal consistency. The splithalf approach was also used: the items were split into even and oddnumbered halves, the Pearson correlation (r) between half-scores was calculated and the Spearman-Brown formula was used to adjust for complete length:

𝑅 = 2𝑟 1 + 𝑟

Content validity was assessed using the item pool's nine dimensions and expert relevancy ratings. The analyses were carried out in MS Excel and SPSS.

Results and discussion

Relevancy analysis

Of the 90 statements evaluated by the 53 judges, 59 met both relevancy criteria, while 31 were dropped. Each of the nine dimensions retained six or seven statements (Table 1). R W values for retained statements ranged from 0.86 to 0.94, whereas M RS values ranged from 2.57 to 2.81. The highest-rated statement was "I identify problems in my turmeric farming before they become serious" (No. 53; R W 0.94, M RS 2.81), followed by statements about avoiding collective responsibility (No. 50; R W 0.93) and monitoring crop progress (No. 38; R W 0.92). Seventeen of the 59 statements are negatively worded and span eight dimensions; only achievement motivation contains none.

Item analysis

None of the 59 relevant statements was removed, since all of them clearly distinguished between high and low scores in the pilot study of sixty farmers (Table 2). The critical ratios varied from 2.52 to 7.10 and all values exceeded the cut-off of t ≥ 1.75 (Edwards, 1957) [20] . The utilization of expert recommendations (No. 41; t = 7.10), learning from the mistakes of the previous season (No. 43; t = 6.68) and enjoying attempting new strategies (No. 18; t = 6.50) were the strongest discriminators. Self-doubt about overseeing farm operations (No. 33; t = 2.52) and taking the initiative to plan FPO activities (No. 47; t = 2.74) were the weakest. With t-values ranging from 2.52 to 6.21, the 17 reverse-scored statements fared roughly as well as the positive ones.

Reliability

The 59-item scale showed high internal consistency, with a Cronbach's alpha of 0.966 (Table 3). In the odd-even split, the two halves had alphas of 0.934 (30 items) and 0.930 (29 items) and correlated at r = 0.961, giving a Spearman-Brown coefficient of 0.980. Alpha for the individual dimensions ranged from 0.872 (managerial ability) to 0.933 (risk-taking ability), so dimension scores may be used provisionally, pending factor analysis (Table 4). Corrected itemtotal correlations ranged from 0.29 (No. 33) upward and no statement fell below the conventional 0.20 floor. [22] and alpha rises with the number of items in any case. Pairs such as Nos. 40/46, 29/59, 13/34, 48/52, 38/40, 35/39, 44/46 and 50/51 are near-mirror statements that overlap in content. A shorter version, built by removing the statements with the lowest item-total correlations or through factor analysis on the main sample, would be easier to administer in the field without loss of reliability.

Limitations of the study

Content validity was based on expert judgement and construct validity has not yet been tested through factor analysis or correlation with related measures such as economic motivation or innovativeness scores. The nine-dimension structure is theoretical and should be confirmed with exploratory or confirmatory factor analysis on the main sample of 240 respondents. Test-retest reliability was also not assessed, although it has been reported for comparable Likert-type scales in extension research (Sawandkar et al., 2026) [19] . The pilot sample of 60 was drawn from a single district and included farmers who do not grow turmeric, although the statements refer to turmeric farming. The discrimination and reliability estimates should therefore be re-checked on the turmeric-growing main sample.

Scoring of the scale

Positive statements are scored 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1 from strongly agree to strongly disagree, and the 17 negative statements are scored in reverse (1 to 5). A respondent's total score can therefore range from 59 to 295. Dimension scores range from 6 to 30 for six-item dimensions and from 7 to 35 for seven-item dimensions. Respondents can be grouped into low, medium and high categories using the mean ± standard deviation.

Conclusion

This study produced a 59-item, nine-dimension scale to measure the entrepreneurial capacities of turmeric growers associated with FPOs. Statements were screened by 53 experts and then tested for discrimination and internal consistency. The instrument can help extension functionaries and FPO managers identify which capacities are weak among members. For example, it can show whether members lag in risk-taking, feedback utilisation or leadership, so that training and handholding can be targeted accordingly. Future work should test the factor structure of the scale, examine its relationship with marketing behaviour and farm income, and adapt it for other commodity-based FPOs. Highlights A nine-dimensional tool was developed to assess the entrepreneurial capacities of turmeric growers who are members of Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs) in Andhra Pradesh 59 statements passed the relevancy threshold (R W ≥ 0.85, equivalent to M RS ≥ overall mean of 2.549) after 53 experts rated 90 edited statements on a three-point continuum.

In a pilot survey, all 59 statements discriminated (t = 2.52-7.10); the scale's Spearman-Brown split-half coefficient was 0.980, and its Cronbach's alpha was 0.966.

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24. How to cite this article: Deepika B, Gopikrishna T, Jyothi V, Nagavani A, Umar SN. A scale to measure the entrepreneurial capacities of turmeric growers in farmer producer organisations. International Journal of Agriculture Extension and Social Development. 2026;9(10):72-77. doi: https://www.doi.org/10.335 45/26180723.2026.v9.i10b.4357