Confined to limited access to chain retailers, small farmers turned to the “thin” farmers markets for their products, in which finding reliable buyers turns out to be difficult and full of uncertainty. Farmers held a perception of lower yield of organic farming is 11.92% less likely to convert to organic farming. The low yield of organic farming is not just perception,but a fact in many areas, due to the lack of high-quality seed, organic fertilizer, and effective pests and weeds sprays. The perception of lower yield could easily explain farmers’ behavior of withholding converting to organic farming. There isn’t much evidence to verify the veracity of the claim of high liability, but the perception came up with a distinct adverse impact.
Farmers concerned about the higher liability in organic farming is 10.57% less likely to convert to organic farming. The conception likely came from the yield uncertainty due to damage from pests and/or weeds, which easily results in default on loan and other financial responsibility that must be cushioned with more debts. Consequently,the perception of high liability discouraged farmers to steer their production to organic farming. The size of a farm matters and negatively impacts the conversion. As the production scale increases, the chance of conversion become smaller. In this sample,the chance of conversion for large farms is 20.71% lower than their smaller counterparts. some previous studies that organic production poses great managerial challenge due to the intensive labor demand in dealing with diseases,pests, applying fertilizer, and handling marketing , and constraints on substitution of capital for labor. As a result, production scale was deemed as an uncontentious barrier to the organic conversion.
In the conversion to organic, the age of producers is another barrier. Table 3 shows that the probability of the conversion dropped substantially as producers become older. With the base group of 30 or young, the age group 31 – 60 has a probability of 20% lower in adopting organic farming, and the group 61 or older has a drop of 24%. It makes sense that the shorter planning horizons for older farmers offered less time to recapture investment costs and capture the long-term benefits. In addition, it was claimed that as one ages, the avoidance of risk becomes more important than expected future higher returns. The conversion to organic farming also demands the time and efforts to assimilate organic knowledge and methods, and likely expose farmers to lower yields and non-premium price in the transition period, and these surely weigh in on farmers decision on organic farming. Education wedged its influence in organic farming in a complex way.
The chance of conversion is 13% higher for farmers who had education of technical school or higher than farmers with just high-school diploma or lower. This conformed a previous claim that farmers with some college education had higher odds of adopting organic farming. However, the impact of education was not observed in conventional farmers and those with mixed enterprises. The lack of observations on mixed enterprise group may be the root of the result. While some results of this study bear resemblances to previous studies, there are some noteworthy differences identified. The impact of off-farm job is one of them.Our model was not in supportive of the claim that there exists an inverse relationship between working off-farm and the adoption of organic farming because off-farm job reduce the availability of labor and hence impedes organic farming practices. On the contrary, the impact of off-farm jobs in our model lead to an increased likelihood of organic conversion, which may reflect the influence of the enhanced risk tolerance due to extra income from off-farm jobs. The absence of off-farm job variable led to substantial changes in parameters of other variables in the model, so it, though less significant in statistics, was retained in the model. The further clarification hinges on the future studies with more observations and elaborated instruments related off-farm job. Analysis of the large survey in the Southern states came up with a few contributing factors in farmers’ choice of conversion to organic production. The pool of factors comprise barriers and stimuli, each of them have been discussed in detail in the previous section.
In view of potential impacts and the efficient way of improve the adoption of organic farming, the four factors of risk aversion, the age of operators, and the size of farms, and marketing channels deserve further elaboration.Organic farming is still at its early stage, there exist tremendous uncertainty in both production and marketing process. For most risk version farmers, an acceptable way to follow was doing by the top dog. Nevertheless the exemplars available at this stage are quite limited. A way to increase farmers’ expose to and know those successful frontrunners is to organize more workshops and training.