Survey and collection of Information on EM and Its Applications

Abstract

Surveying and collecting information on EM and its application had been carried out in order to search its distribution in Thailand, as well as the general idea and its applications. The surveying has been performed by using three forms of questionnaire for different target persons, they were : General population, academics and farmers. The results revealed that the general group of 511 people responded only 54 people (10.6% of total) get to know EM, among these, 93.8% agreed that EM was moderately and highly useful, whereas 87% agreed to its moderately and little negative impacts, only 2 people (0.4%) ever used EM. Among 409 academic people, 74.6% know EM and almost all of them belonged to Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives and Ministry of University Bureau. Sixty percentages of academic people agreed that EM was moderately and highly useful. Among then, 22.8% whoever used EM were in agriculture area and 9.6% were in microbiology area. Most of them (87.7%) agreed that it was of less harm or disadvantages, however, there was 31% who did not recommend to use EM due to its, ineffectiveness and unclear properties. Among 195 farmers who answered the questionaires, it was found that 123 farmers (63.4%) knew EM, most of them (79.8%) were in the area of plant cultivation and 81% of farmers ever used EM and obtained directly from the producer, while 17.7% of farmers ever tried other similar products. Collection of EM information from published artioles were performed. The number of 31 articles classified into 7 categories were reported with 27 Thai items and 4 foreign items.