Peer-to-peer exchanges and diffusion of technology in an organized farmer framework

In the projections of Farmers Fighting Poverty the number of peer-to-peer missions, farmers from OECD countries that bring advise and support to their colleagues in the developing world, increases from 150 in 2007 to 461 in 2010. This increase follows the general increase in activities that is hoped to be achieved by the agri-agencies and OECD based farmers unions. They will be active in farmers organizations’ projects that will directly involve 2.7 million farmers from developing countries as active participants of these projects. These farmers belong to associations and federations with a membership of almost 25 million farmers. This is about 10% of the total organized peasantry worldwide. This total is one way or another linked to the development effort though the national, regional and worldwide bodies to which these associations belong.

Involving 1% of this organized farming sector in development cooperation activities or bringing in expertise for 34 full time equivalents a year cannot seriously be thought to spur economic development, bring democracy or reduce poverty, one would say. Still, this can be envisaged taking into consideration that the 1% participants should be entrepreneurs carefully selected among the total membership of the organizations involved. Combining theories on entrepreneurship, human and social capital with the economic theory of technological diffusion, one could probably come to an understanding of the dynamics of the force of development of an organized frameworks like farmers’ organizations. Up to now, we only harvested stories on this subject, like AgriPool expert Bert Sandee’s one: he introduced in Niger a rack to conserve onions. In a follow-up mission he found farmers using this rack 1.500 kilometres form the site where he had shown one for the first time. And they explicitly referred to the fact that they learnt this from their national federation that had information obtained from a foreign expert.

In terms of the diffusion study of Bryce Ryan and Neal Gross (1943) the farmers we are aiming at are innovators and early adopters. As one recalls Ryan’s and Gross’s study tracked the adoption of the new hybrid seed corn by farmers. Ryan chose hybrid corn as the focus of investigation on social factors in economic decisions. The objective was to study how an farmer’s social relationships with his neighbors influenced the individual’s decision to adopt hybrid corn. Gross, a graduate student in sociology, was hired as a research assistant on the hybrid corn diffusion project. Ryan and Gross selected two small communities located west of , and proceeded to interview all of the farmers living there.

Over the course of the study period 1928-1941, all but two of the 259 farmers studied had adopted the new hybrid corn. When plotted cumulatively on a year-by-year basis, the adoption rate formed an S-shape curve over time. After the first five years, by 1933, only five percent of the farmers had adopted the new corn. By 1936, 40 percent had decided to adopt the hybrid corn. Then the rate of adoption leveled off as fewer and fewer farmers remained to adopt the new seed.

Farmers were assigned to categories based on when they adopted the new seed. The five segments of farmers who adopted the hybrid corn seed, or adopter categories, and their percentages relative to the study group are:

(1) innovators (5%),
(2) early adopters (10%),
(3) early majority (35%),
(4) late majority (35%), and
(5) laggards (15%).

Compared to later adopters (Early Adopters Early Majority, Late Majority, Laggards) Innovators had larger-sized farms, higher incomes, and more years of formal education. The innovators were judged to be more cosmopolitan, as measured by their number of trips to Des Moines (’s largest city, located about seventy-five miles away). This first group of farmers, most importantly, had the ability to both understand and apply complex technical knowledge, and to cope with a high degree of uncertainty about new ideas or technology.

In other words, the innovator group was capable of making a decision based solely on information. This group also had the financial means to be able to take a risk. In this respect, the categories of adopter groups in the Diffusion Model can be correlated to their financial means and tolerance to risk.

The second group, the Early Adopters, were typically respected members of the rural community and often were in dual roles as both farmers and role models in the banking, real estate, government, educational or religious institutions of the area. This group was highly successful and had the highest degree of opinion leadership and peer respect among all the categories in the Ryan and Gross study.

We think that we recruit farmers for international exchanges from these groups of early adaptors and innovators, giving their exposure to international contacts them the cosmopolitan outlook. But more important we think that by recruiting them from farmers' organizations, being most of them respected farm leaders, they have that frequent interaction with other farmers that spurs of diffusion to the early majority.

The third group, the Early Majority, was characterized by frequent social interaction with their peers but seldom had positions of opinion leadership. This group tended to undergo considerable deliberation in every decision.

The Late Majority group represented fully one-third of the total population studied and, while generally skeptical and cautious, was most susceptible to the influence of peer pressure. This group was often guided by economic necessity since its members were among the less financially successful in the community.

The final group, the Laggards, generally had no opinion leadership in the community, tended to be somewhat socially isolated, was suspicious of new ideas and had limited financial resources. This group is characterized by the over-my-dead-body philosophy of change.

The typical farmer in the Bryan-Gross study moved slowly from awareness and knowledge of the innovation to adoption despite the obvious, objective advantage of the new corn over the open-pollinated variety it was adopted to replace. The innovation-decision period from first knowledge to the adoption decision averaged about nine years for all respondents in spite of the tremendously successful results of farmers who first adopted the new seed. In addition, the average respondent took three or four years after planting his first hybrid seed, usually on a small trial plot, before deciding to plant 100 percent of his corn acreage in hybrid varieties.

The critical insight in Ryan and Gross’s study is that only the first group, the Innovators, based their decision to adopt the new corn on information. The middle groups of adopters decided to try the new technology based on the opinion or experience of others. The latest groups to adopt the hybrid corn seed were motivated more by momentum than information or opinion.

Organization of farmers, especially in the kind of open associations with members who have multi-stranded realtions becasue they participate in a variety of gremia, influences -as we suppose- especially the middle groups.
(Source: http://www.hgs.org/en/art/?1019 and Blokland, 2007 'peer-to-peer exchanges and economic development. forthcoming)