A scale to measure attitude of registered organic farmers towards organic livestock farming

Summary

Organic farming an innovative area gaining importance worldwide and became a boon to the areas which are organic by default and far from the reach of green revolution technologies. Uttarakhand state in India, where most of its farming is organic by default, promoting organic farming in a systematic way through creation of special institutions like UOCB. As attitudes assist individuals in processing complex information and to make decisions, an instrument has been developed to measure attitude of organic farmers towards organic livestock farming, for which ‘Likert method of summated ratings’ was followed. A total of 102 statements were developed from the subject matter of organic animal husbandry standards, worked out by the Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Agriculture, Government of India (GOI), and published by the Agriculture Processed Food and Exports Development Authority (APEDA).
A total of 94 statements resulted after edition of 102 statements as per the criteria suggested by Edwards (1969), and were sent to 101 extension specialists working in various Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR) and State Agriculture and Veterinary Universities throughout India for the critical evaluation of statements on a 3 point continuum. Of the responses received from 50 out of 101 judges, a total of 47 statements were selected basing on relevancy weightage, percentage and mean relevancy scores, and these were subjected to item analysis by administering to 60 farmers from a non-sample area. A total of 21 statements were selected based on the‘t’ values (above 2.75) resulted from the item analysis and included in the final scale. Thus, the instrument developed to measure attitude of farmers towards organic livestock farming consists of 13 positive and 8 negative attitude statements representing the various areas of organic animal husbandry standards (NSOP, 2000) viz. sustainability, ecology, environment, animal health and welfare, animal production, certification, quality of organic products including philosophical and ideological views of organic farmers.