The Faced Problems of Organic Farming Producers (Sample of Mardin Province)

Organic farming activities in Turkey have started to develope rapidly after the 1980s; and between the years 2002-2016, approximately a tenfold increase took place in areas where organic farming was being practiced and the organic agricultural production has shown a rise from 300 000 tons to 2.5 million tons within the same period. However, when Turkey's potential of organic production is taken into consideration, the mentioned production rates show that the current potential is not used efficiently. Determining the problems faced by producers in maintaining the current organic production activities and providing them with solutions for solving these problems is as important as the dissemination activities for making the organic production widespread. In this study, a face-to-face meeting and a phone-call based survey were applied in order to determine the problems and socioeconomic circumstances of the producers who have been in the act of organic pruduction in Mardin province and its districts in 2017. To that end, 52 out of 89 registered producers were reached. The gathered data were analysed through one of the tests without frequency, percentage and parametric, Mann-Whitney, using SPSS version 22.00. According to the result of the study, it was determined that farmers' age average is high and their education level is low. also it was found out that almost all of the producers are dealing with grapery, while %50 of them are doing organic farming in an area of 20 decare and less. For the producers to whom the survey was applied, the most important problems observed are marketting issues, absence of contract production, the used pesticides' being ineffective and the lack of information in cultivation techniques. It is thought that producers have a low income because they keep doing organic farming in order to benefit from the agriculturual supports despite having important problems; they do not have any production techniques and the ability to cope with diseases and pests. That they are not aware of the possibility of benefiting from the knowledge aqcuisition sources when a single problem is faced makes the need for increasing the dissemination activities for producers especially important.