Opinion Leaders In Agriculture

Development organizations seeking agricultural opinion leaders as implementing partners may be hard-pressed to find them; only 89 respondents, or 4 percent of the whole weighted sample, matched this description. (For ease of analysis, only those who said they were opinion leaders for crop farming are included here, though 39 of those same individuals also were livestock opinion leaders.)

However, opinion leaders may be worth locating and developing as partners, given that they seem particularly well-informed individuals and thus well placed to be hubs of information for their communities. Opinion leaders were more-active consumers of general news and information from most sources, as shown in Chart 1. Interestingly, the handful of respondents getting information specifically about farming from the internet and SMS were not necessarily opinion leaders.

Chart 1
           

As Table 1 shows, many opinion leaders are somewhat older, better educated and wealthier relative to the profile of all farmers, and they are also predominantly male.

Table 1
                

Of course, this typical profile may not bode well for the many development organizations that focus their assistance on younger, female, lower-income or uneducated farmers—those who are more often left out of the farming information chain. There may be ways to design communication and education programs such that the opinion-leader group is incentivized and motivated to pass along more-critical information to those typically bypassed by communication channels. It may also be possible to "groom" some younger or female farmers as opinion leaders if they show particular interest in the issues involved.

Click Below to Access a Different Development Topic