Others Influencing Others

Traditional agricultural Extension methods such as summer field days and winter conferences are sometimes questioned as outdated in our emerging information age. The problem may not be the effectiveness of these methods, but rather the way these approaches are evaluated. The traditional yardstick for measuring success of field events and conferences has been whether participants change their behavior as a result of participation. But such a narrow focus on participants misses the impact of participants on others. To capture the ripple effects of Extension programs, it's necessary to evaluate in a way that measures long-term, overall impacts-especially the influence of participants on others.

We addressed the long-term impact of field days and conferences in evaluating adoption of no-till seeding of small grains. Our research shows that farmers are the most important influence on the adoption of new approaches by other farmers.1 These results reaffirm the importance of targeting beyond direct participants in designing and evaluating Extension programs.

We studied farmers' adoption of no-till seeding of small grains in the highly erosive Palouse region of eastern Washington and northern Idaho.2 No-till seeding is an important conservation innovation in agriculture. At the time of the follow-up study, 23% of the region's farmers were known users of no-till seeding within 50 miles of the summer conservation field days and the winter tillage conference. These farmers were asked to identify the most important influence on their decision to use no-till seeding. The results clearly show the primary influence of farmers on other farmers.

Forty-two percent of the no-till users identified other farmers as the single most important influence on their decision to first try no-till. The Soil Conservation Service, which provided technical help, was a distant second, being identified as the most important influence by 32% of the farmers. Third was no-till tours, identified by 17%. No other source of influence was identified by more than five percent of the farmers. Thus, despite the availability of many alternative sources of information, farmers were the single most important influence on other farmers' decisions to try no-till.

Research on the use of widely accepted agricultural practices has shown that use begins with only a few farmers and then spreads more rapidly.3 The use of no-till by Palouse farmers followed this pattern. Only eight farmers first used this practice in the initial five-year period (1970-74), followed by 32 others in the next four years (1975-78), 87 in the next four years (1979-82), and 45 in the final two years of that study (1983-84). Each farmer in the study was shown a list of all other no-till users and asked to indicate which, if any on the list, had influenced the farmer to first use no-till.

We then compared information from this study with the complete registration lists from the summer field days and winter conferences to test two hypotheses: (1) the earliest users of no-till are more likely than late and nonusers to participate in Extension field days and conferences and (2) influential users of no-till (those reported by other farmers as having influenced their decisions to first use no-till) are more likely to participate in both events.

Support for these hypotheses would suggest that Extension is accomplishing more through these events than would be indicated by simply noting numbers of participants and subsequent changes in these participants' conservation behaviors. In addition, we would have evidence that Extension is reaching those farmers who, because of their innovative use and subsequent influence on others, are most critical to the initiation and subsequent diffusion of no-till farming methods.

Data to test these hypotheses were obtained from two sources. One source was a set of structured two-hour interviews conducted in the winter of 1984-85 with all farmers in the Palouse region of Whitman County, Washington, and Latah County, Idaho, who had used no-till at least once. Of 187 users, face-to-face interviews were completed with 174 or 93%. Of 140 farmer operators in a random sample comparison group who hadn't used no-till, 114 interviews were completed for an 81% response.4

The second source of data consisted of registration lists for all summer Palouse Conservation Field Days from 1974 to 1985 and all winter Conservation Tillage Conferences from 1982 through 1986. The summer Palouse Conservation Station Field Day presents new research information about conservation farming. The winter Conservation Tillage Conference is a multiagency/agricultural industry effort to package information for on-farm application. Each of these events draws from 200 to 400 attendees yearly from a broad geographic area. By comparing the lists of registrants with farmers' answers in the no-till interviews, the hypotheses can be appropriately tested.

Data in Table 1 show that the earliest users of no-till were significantly more likely than later users and nonusers to have participated. For example, 25% of the first group to use no-till attended the summer field days more than once, but the proportions steadily drop to 1.8% of the nonusers.

The relationship between time of first use and attendance at each type of Extension event is statistically significant, p < .002 for the summer field day and p < .003 for the winter tillage conference.5 Thus, the first hypothesis is supported: each of these two events was more likely to attract early users than late or nonusers.

It's important that participants in the summer field days were also significantly more likely to participate in the winter tillage conferences. For example, 29% of those who had attended more than one field day had also attended more than one conservation tillage conference; in contrast, 91% of those who hadn't attended a field day had also not attended a winter conference. Thus, the two events were inclined to reach the same audience.

Data in Table 2 show that those early no-till farmers identified by other no-till farmers as having influenced their decision to try this practice were also significantly more likely than noninfluentials to have attended both events. For example, while about one-third of those farmers who influenced two or more other farmers to use no-till had attended the summer field days at least once, only 12% of those who influenced no one had attended. The relationship between influence and attendance is statistically significant for each event (p = .04 for the summer field day and p = .002 for the winter tillage conference). Thus, the second hypothesis is also supported: influential early users of no-till were more likely to participate in both Extension events.

We found that both a summer field day and a winter conservation tillage conference were effective in reaching influential early users of no-till in the Palouse region. This study of influences on farmers' decisions to use no-till in the Pacific Northwest provides an important perspective for evaluating Extension techniques: farmers were most influenced in their decision to try no-till by the experiences of other farmers; therefore, Extension may be most effective by working closely with those early users on whom other farmers rely for information.

Because the diffusion of new agricultural practices that become widely accepted usually begins slowly and then gathers momentum, the first users are especially important as an Extension audience. By reaching the earliest users, and in particular those early users who influence others, Extension can have a far greater impact than might be indicated by tallies of participation or changes in conservation behavior of only the participants.

In this era of advanced information technologies, it's tempting to believe that media and agencies have a direct impact on their clientele's decisions. These results show, however, that reaching farmers through other farmers remains important as a way to diffuse new ideas. This study suggests that, indeed, these two Extension techniques, rich with opportunities to see, hear, and talk attracted early users and further enabled them to diffuse conservation tillage technology to other farmers.

Early adopters, thereby, became "extenders" - yet another Extension education technique!

1. Don A. Dillman, Donald Beck, and John E. Carlson. "Factors Influencing the Diffusion of No-Till Agriculture in the Pacific Northwest," inSTEEP-Conservation Concepts and Accomplishments, L. F. Elliot, ed. (Pullman: Washington State University, University Press, 1987), pp. 343-64.

2. John E. Carlson, Don A. Dillman, and C. Ellen Lamiman, The Present and Future Use of No-Till in the Palouse, Research Bulletin No. 140 (Boise: University of Idaho, Agricultural Experiment Station, 1987).

3. Everett M. Rogers, The Diffusion of Innovations, 3rd ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1983).

4. Carlson, Dillman, and Lamiman, The Present and Future Use of No-Till in the Palouse.

5. Chi-square is a social science test of significance. It's based on the difference between the observed distribution of values and the distribution that would be expected if there were no relationship between the two variables under study. The larger the differences between observed and expected frequencies, the larger the value of chi-square. When all observed and expected frequencies are identical, chi-square will be zero. Chi-square doesn't measure the direction of the relationship. The probability associated with the chi-square statistic is interpreted as the probability of obtaining a chi-square of the reported magnitude assuming a random sample and no relationship between the variables. Gamma is an ordinal measure of association. Gamma values vary from -1 to +1, indicating the magnitude of the association between two variables as well as the direction. For more information see: Earl Babbie, The Practice of Social Research (Belmont, California: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1983).