A Study of the impact of some variables on the knowledge and attitudes in agricultural guides towards the use of the organic agriculture in Sharkia Governorate

The organic agriculture is considered as one of the non traditional farming. It has an important role in the export activity and for increasing demand on its products in the local and international markets. This study aims to indentify the level of knowledge of the agricultural guides in the field of use organic agriculture, and to analyze the most important factors affecting the attitudes of the investigated guides toward the use of organic agriculture. The study also aims to know the problems that face the guides and their recommendations to solve these problems. The study was executed in Sharkia Governorate using a random sample of the agricultural guides working in the agricultural cooperatives. It included 100 respondents from 3 districts: Awlad Sakr, Kafr Sakr and Faquos in January and February 2012, The results indicated that 75% of the investigated guides had a medium level of khowledge and 61% had a low level of attitude toward the use of organic agriculture. The main factors affecting these results were the age, number of training programs, the sources of knowledge and information, as well as the degree of the attitude toward extension training, the calculated values of for these variables were 4.728,5.615,3.728, and 7.181. On the other hand, the most important factors affecting the degree of the guides attitude toward using organic agriculture were the age, experience in agriculture, number of training programs, degree of attitude toward extension training, sources of informations, and level of knowledge to use organic agriculture, the calculated values of t were 2.852, 3.091, 5,119, 8.414, 4,069 and 4.754, The results, indicated. that the most important problems facing the use of organic agriculture were the lake of sufficint informations (55%), the lake of the agricultural inputs (94%) and the organic fertilizers were unavailable (94%), the experience was very low (65%), the fragmentation of the agricultural holdings (60%) and their are no markets for the organic products (30%).