Information seeking behaviour of small and marginal farmers practicing conventional and integrated farming system

Agricultural information is useful for farmers to overcome their inadequacies in knowledge of certain basic practices that may include technical, marketing, social, and legal agricultural information. It often involves face-to-face communication, as well as passive reception through mass media. With the passage of time, different agricultural technologies have been developed for the welfare of the farming community but a few of them are found at farmer’s field overtime. It is very important to timely disseminate useful agricultural information to the farmers for sustaining their livelihoods. On the other hands, the farmers should have good information seeking behavior to take farming decisions efficiently and ensure sustainability in the livelihoods. The present study was carried out in the two states of India namely Haryana and Uttar Pradesh and the finding of the study depicts that the proportion of respondents in mass media exposure, training exposure and exposure to e– services was higher in integrated farming systems as compared to conventional farming systems in both the states. Regarding the risk orientation of the respondents it was noted that medium scores were obtained in conventional farming systems, whereas it was found high in integrated farming systems irrespective of the states. Majority of the respondents had favorable opinion towards integrated farming systems in the study area. With respect to the reason for shifting towards IFS, it was found that majority of the respondents from both the states perceived IFS as relatively advantageous (88.33%), triable (87.33%), compatible (86.66%) and simple (84.33%) respectively. So, it is necessary to ensure adequate information supply to the farmers for their betterment as well as for sustainable agriculture development.