Farmers’ preferences selecting agricultural consulting services

Abstract

The Lithuanian farmers face with a huge need for information and counselling services to increase the competitiveness of farms and to increase farmers' ability to use the EU and Lithuanian govern- ment support funds for them. Farmers need to meet their needs of specific consulting services provided by various organizations and individual consultants in Lithuania. This raises the question: what are the most important factors for farmers choosing consulting services . Those are important for implications for consulting service business strategy and regulatory policies. Hypothesis - the most im- portant factors of farmers’ selecting agricultural consulting services are the counselling content, the counselling technique and the length of counselling. The aim of the paper - to identify and investi- gate the factors influencing farmer s’ preferences selecting agricul- tural consulting services. The analysis of these issues was a basis for empirical research in Lithuania. For the research completion, the methods of questionnaire survey were applied. The results of the study showed that the most significant factors forming farmers' pre- ferences selecting agricultural co nsulting services are consulting content and length of consulting. The regressive analysis enabled the research in causality of connections and revealed that there is present linear and statistically strong or very strong impact among these variables. Also there are pr esent direct and meaningful im- pacts: between counselling cont ent and farmers’ age, between length of counselling and farmers’ the level of education and the type of farming.