Socio-economic characteristics of dairy farmers sourcing information from digital and traditional media in Andhra Pradesh

Abstract

Dairy farming has enormous potential to augment dairy farmers socioeconomic status. The present study was conducted in purposively selected Visakhapatnam, Prakasam and Chittoor districts of Andhra Pradesh. Twenty dairy farmers were chosen randomly from each of the selected villages based on their media exposure to digital and traditional media. Then, they were divided into two groups of 10. The ones who use digital media and those who use traditional media as their source of information. The study included 60 traditional and 60 digital media farmers. Thus, a total of120 farmers were involved in this study. A simple statistical approach was employed to evaluate the data acquired. The study revealed that most respondents (70.00%) were middle-aged men (96.67%), literate (73.35%), and 46.67% were from the Backward caste (BC). The majority of respondents had agriculture (56.65%) as their main occupation, medium (69.165%) herd size, medium income (65.00%) and medium social participation (89.17%). Most of the respondents (60.83%) had medium media exposure, with medium information seeking behaviour (72.5%) and medium extension contact (50.83%) respectively.