Abstract
Access to and usage of smartphones for agricultural purposes amongst small-scale farmers in rural areas of developing countries is still limited. Smartphones may provide an opportunity to develop farmers’ capacities with specific applications offering fast access to continually updated and reliable information. This study develops a framework to investigate the cognitive and affective behavioural drivers of smallholder farmers´ intention to use a smartphone in a developing country context. For this, survey data was collected from 664 randomly selected small-scale farmers in Bihar State, India in 2016. The analysis included a partial least square estimation of the behavioural model. The results confirm positive influences on the intention to use a smartphone for agricultural purposes through subjective norms, attitude, self-control, as well as positive and negative anticipated emotions. There is no evidence that negative anticipated emotions related to failure outweighed other factors. These results extend the academic literature with new conceptual insights and provide application-oriented implications for stakeholders, such as NGOs, extension services and research institutes.
Highlights
Agricultural production is complex, and farmers need to make proper and timely decisions on a range of several agricultural subjects at different stages of the production cycle
Based on a conceptual model which integrates Perugini’s and Bagozzi’s (2001) goal-based behavioural model with the model of technology acceptance by Cheon et al (2012) and Venkatesh and Davis (2000), the objective of the present study is to develop and empirically test a comprehensive behavioural model for identifying and quantifying the cognitive and affective drivers of smallholder farmersintention to use a smartphone in developing countries
Negative anticipated emotions have a relatively low and significant influence on desires (0.073**; H3a+) but no significant influence on intention (− 0.002; H3b−). These results suggest that positive anticipated emotions seem to facilitate spontaneous behaviour, most likely due to their high degree of personalization and innovation (Kim and Shin 2015), creating an “emotional lift” during farmers’ decisions to use smartphones for agricultural purposes (Lee and Shin 2016)
Summary
Agricultural production is complex, and farmers need to make proper and timely decisions on a range of several agricultural subjects at different stages of the production cycle To this end, external information sources may provide farmers with input to help with the best time for seeding, to improve market access or to adopt more efficient technologies (Aker 2011; Mittal et al 2010). Smallholder farmers in the rural areas of developing countries are still especially disadvantaged with regard to capacities involving modern sustainable farming practices In such a developing country context, the most common measures with which to disseminate knowledge over the past decades have been extension services such as Farmer-Field-Schools or Self-Help-Groups based on frontal teaching methods to farmers or with direct interaction with experts through a participatory and demand-driven approach (Phillips et al 2014). The necessity of personal presence and the resulting inequalities of access have been criticised as inhibiting such measures’ efficiency (Phillips et al 2014)
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