Analysis of Barriers to the Development of Conservation Agriculture in East Azarbaijan province

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Fakhroddin khamoushi ¹
• adel Taheri Hajivand ²

¹ Master's student in Agricultural Mechanization Engineering, Department of Biosystem Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture, Tabriz University, Tabriz, Iran

² Department of Biosystems Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Tabriz, Tabriz city, Iran

Abstract

Keywords

• East Azerbaijan
• Driving factors
• sustainable agriculture
• conservation agriculture

Main Subjects

• ?????

Analysis of Barriers to the Development of Conservation Agriculture in East Azarbaijan province

EXTENDED ABSTRACT

Introduction

The importance of conservation agriculture (CA) in mitigating poverty is ensuring food security, and addressing challenges posed by climate change and increasing energy demands. CA aims to preserve soil fertility, reduce production costs, and enhance moisture retention, thereby improving agricultural productivity sustainably. It promotes practices such as permanent soil cover, minimal soil disturbance, and crop diversity, facilitating timely operations and enhancing rainfed and irrigated agriculture.

Various factors influence farmers' acceptance and participation in soil protection measures, including awareness, education, income, land characteristics, and access to resources and services. Studies have investigated these factors in different contexts, highlighting their significance in adopting sustainable soil management practices.

The study aims to identify factors influencing CA development in East Azarbaijan province through qualitative content analysis, expert interviews, and interpretive structural modeling. The goals include identifying drivers of CA development, ranking them, and designing a model to understand their relationships and levels of influence.

Materials and Methods

 The current research was started in the fall of 1400 in East Azarbaijan province to identify and evaluate the factors driving the development of conservation agriculture. First, the qualitative content analysis method was used, the reason for that is the possibility it provides for regular analysis of information and deeper and more complex comments such as semi-guided interview reports. According to a number of experts, content analysis is quantitative in terms of the nature of research through which the qualitative content of sources is examined. This method was first used in communication sciences and is currently used in the analysis of various texts. In content analysis, the researcher analyzes the generated messages and seeks to find answers to his research questions. Content analysis is a suitable method to answer questions in and around the content of a message (Iman and Noushadi, 2019). Also, in the model design stage, an interpretation of the structural modeling method for the barriers to the development of conservation agriculture in East Azerbaijan province has been done. In this method, the effective and essential factors are first identified, and then, using the presented method, the relationships between these factors and the way to achieve progress are presented by them. The ISM method analyzes the relationship between indicators by analyzing the criteria at several different levels. The interpretive structure model is able to determine the relationship between indicators that are individually or collectively dependent on each other. This method analyzes the relationship between indicators by analyzing the criteria in several different levels. The ISM method can be used to analyze the relationship between multivariate attributes defined for a problem (Suti et al., 2010).

Results and Discussion

Based on the results obtained from the content analysis of the interviews, 37 driving factors for the development of conservation agriculture were identified in the initial coding stage. After the merging of the codes that were similar in nature, the primary codes were divided into eight main groups, including policy and planning, structural and institutional, support and financial, monitoring and evaluation, culture building, market input and infrastructure, research and development. and promotional and educational were classified. Among the primary codes, the most frequency is related to Pishran, attracting the cooperation of universities and educational centers for conservation agriculture training (culturalization), allocating credits for farmers to buy special tools (support and financing) and using packages and plans. Incentives to motivate the development of conservation agriculture (planning at the provincial and regional level) are in studies (Friedrich et al., 2009), (Kasem and Friedrich., 2011), (Ngendu et al., 2013). , (Latifi et al. 2018), the importance of conservation agriculture development drivers has been mentioned.

Conclusion

 Using interpretive structural modeling method, the eight identified main drivers were placed in four levels. At the first level of the input market and infrastructure that the development of protective agriculture requires these factors as a base; The results of most researches show the effect of this factor on the adoption of conservation agriculture development in African countries (Ray et al., 2011). The drivers (policy and planning, structural and institutional, culture building, research and development, promotional and educational) were placed in the second level of model design and it was found that there is a strong relationship between them. Also, in the third level of model design, support and service drivers were placed, and in the fourth level, monitoring and evaluation drivers were identified. Based on the results of the analysis and investigation of the driving force and dependence of the drivers of conservation agriculture development, based on the results obtained from the drivers of conservation agriculture development, the input and infrastructure market drivers (D6) are placed at the level of dependent variables (II). took This propellant has a strong dependency and a weak lead, and basically it has a high impact and a small impact on the system. Also, policy and planning drivers (D1), structural and institutional (D2), culture building (D5), research and development (D7), promotional and educational (D8), support and financial (D3) and Monitoring and evaluation (D4), in the group of linking factors (III), were placed with a high dependence force and a high driving force and have a high dependence on other drivers. So that any action regarding these factors will affect other drivers. There will also be a feedback effect on it.