Individual Factors Affecting Farmers’ Motivation to Participate in Date Growers’ Organizations in Khuzestan

Khuzestan Province has a great share in Iran’s date production in which many rural households are directly dependent to dates production. However, small holding system has led to a lot of challenges faced by small scale farmers whereas much potential of date production and marketing lost every year. Despite of strong felt need to social capital development and government’s recent activities in order to help farmers to organize themselves, there is not so much interest in this connection generally. So, the purpose of this study was to provide a framework for understanding the individual factors affecting farmers’ motivation to participate in date growers’ organizations. The population of the research consisted of 584 members of five present date growers’ organizations. By the use of Cochran Formula, 120 farmers were randomly selected as research sample. Data were gathered trough a researcher-made questionnaire and analyzed by the use of SPSS software. The results of multiple regression analysis indicated that three independent variables namely "degree of formal education", "attendance in extension-education courses" and "years of date growing", predicted 62% of variation of farmers’ total motivation to participate in date growers’ organizations.