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The paper analysed the effect of farmer’s exposure on different channels in particular
establishment of foreign agricultural investments (FAI) farms that are seen as influential in
promoting agricultural technology use among neighbouring farmers. Based on proportionate
random sampling strategy in areas with both foreign and domestic commercial farms, the effects
of farmer characteristics and different exposure channels for promoting and learning agricultural
technologies were fitted and estimated in the general Poisson model. Results show that farmer’s age,
mobile phones ownership, household poverty, self learning by doing, learning from neighbours,
domestic investors, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), National Agricultural Research
and Extension Services (NARES) and farmer’s location significantly influence agricultural
technologies use among farmers living near commercial farms. But age and household poverty
were inverse related to the intensity of farmer’s agricultural technology use. It implies that old
age and poverty negatively affect use of agricultural technologies while exposure to FAI is not
effective channel for farmer to use agriculture technologies in areas with commercial farms. It was
concluded that presence of FAI farms without formal and informal interactions with neighboring
farmers does not influence the use of agricultural technologies among farmers, therefore a mere
presence of FAI farms should be considered as private investment and not necessarily as a means
for promoting agricultural technology use to neighboring farmers. A selective strategy should
be considered to use FAI farms as means of promoting use of agricultural technologies among
neighboring smallholder farmers based on crop similarity, location endowments, socio-economic
characteristics of farmers, extension services availability and technologies used by FAI farms. |
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