Factors Related to the Agricultural Extension Practice of Village Agricultural Volunteers in Bangkok

Abstract

The purposes of this research were to study 1) volunteers basic personal information including economic factors and social factors of village agricultural volunteers in Bangkok 2) knowledge in the practice factor of a village agricultural volunteers 3) the performance of agricultural village volunteers 4) find the relationship between knowledge and work performance of village agricultural volunteers 5) the problems in the operation of agricultural village volunteers in the area. The data were conducted by using questionnaire from 60 volunteers. The analyzed statistical values include frequency, percentage, average, maximum, minimum, standard deviation and the correlation coefficient. The results showed that most of the farmers in the village were male with the average aged was 50.12 years. The majority of the marital status was married and the majority of the education level was primary school level. The main occupation was agricultural and most of the informant did not have secondary occupation. The average agricultural based income was 183,333.33 Baht per year. The average secondary non-agricultural based income was 16,400 Baht per year. In addition, apart from being a village volunteer, the volunteers did not participate in any other role in the community. Nor they were member of any other agricultural organizations.
On assessing their knowledge for their work, the result found that most of them had high level of knowledge (56.70). The overall performance on their duties was at a high level ( = 3.69) and on monitoring agricultural situation in the village and reporting urgent emergency to the most relevant agencies ( = 3.99). Testing the hypothesis found that there was a correlation between the village agricultural volunteers knowledge on their operation with the statistical significance 0.05. The most significant problem to the volunteers was when farmers did not benefit from the volunteer’s activities.