Understanding situational incompatibility of payment for the delivery of public extension services

Persistent financial problems confront public extension organizations world-wide. Governments have embarked on funding arrangements, including commercializing the delivery of extension services to producers to ensure financial sustainability. These funding methods are innovative in the sense that they have not been used previously. They have to be accepted eventually by producers. The situational incompatibility aspects represent the barriers en route to the adoption of such innovations. This study therefore attempts to identify the perceived problem/barriers, commonly called independent variables associated with the adoption of innovations, such as the payment for the delivery of public extension visits. Further assessment is made of the important independent variables that contribute the most to the variance in the adoption of payment for the delivery of public extension visits. A non-probability survey of 97 medium and small-scale commercial crop farmers was conducted between September and October 2010 in three districts of the Free State Province. Findings indicate that farming orientation, group membership, desired number of visits and perceived credibility of the public extension service made the most contribution to explain the variation in the adoption of the payment for the delivery of public extension visits. Credibility of information source and desired number of visits made the single most important contributions. These findings have positive implications for funding extension service delivery.