Assessing the Information Seeking Behavior of Urban Farmers to Design an Integrated Extension Model

Abstract

Even though the urbanisation is considered as a development indicator, the tremendous migration from rural areas to urban areas leads to serious environmental, health and economic issues. Due to the space and time constraints, the urban entity used to depend on rural community for their food products.  But in the same time, highly priced demand for land and the lesser profit from farming results in withdrawal of rural farmers from farming. And these above mentioned factors contributed to a gap in supply and demand for food. This gap leads to the non-availability of nutritious food and thereby, made difficult for urban dwellers  to access it due the high price. And the result was seen as a double burden in the form of malnutrition and obesity among urban dwellers. The concept of Urban Farming can bring back the traditional homestead farming culture and more than that, a nutritionally secured and environmentally sustainable society. As most of the urban dwellers are new to this setup, they need information and assistance for bring it in a successful way. Hence, there is a necessity for understanding their information needs, and the sources currently they are depending. The present study focuses on the information seeking behaviour and its utilisation constraints experienced by the farmers in an urban community. The study was carried out in the period from December 2020 to March 2021 in Ernakulam and Calicut districts which ranks first and third in degree of urbanisation in Kerala respectively. From the findings of the study it is understood that, their information needs varies from the selection of nutritious food crop to marketing of surplus quantity produced. The constraints analysis could give suggestions for improvement and it can narrow down the gap between farmers - extension system. Based on this, an integrated urban farming extension model has been designed for the effective information dissemination to the farmers. This can save time of farmers and efforts of extension agents, and it will motivate them towards potential adoption of more technologies.