Analysis of smallholder farmers’s ICT-adoption and use through their personal information space

Abstract

By now ICT has apparently penetrated the agricultural production processes and farm management tasks. It is necessary to understand the characteristics of these processes in order to effectively exploit the potential inherent in infocommunication devices. With the examination of the information environment or the preferred sources of farm-related information we can get important insights about the role of ICT in the personal information space of farmers. Analysing the database comes from a questionnaire survey conducted in May and June 2015 in Hajdú-Bihar county among smallholder farmers, the article concludes that farmers have different preferences in regard to using information sources, based on which they can be divided into distinct categories, while the information space that results from their choices of these sources gives a clear clue to ICT adaptation and usage. Three distinct groups could be set up, each having their own attributes, information preferences and information activities: ‘the information accumulators’, ‘the analytically-minded’ and ‘the isolated ones’.