Effectiveness of mobile based digital farm advisories in dissemination of information: A study in North Karnataka

Mobile based digital farm advisories are revolutionizing the way agricultural information is delivered to farmers by providing timely, location-specific information. Digital advisories have become a powerful tool for technology transfer to the farming community with increased digital literacy. The effectiveness of these advisories becomes a prime importance. The present study was conducted during the year 2024 with 180 farmers using various mobile based digital farm advisories in Belgaum, Haveri and Gadag districts of North Karnataka. The effectiveness was measured using 7 dimensions. Radar chart was used to represent the normalized values of different dimensions which depicts that relevance of technical content and need/problem based information dimensions contribute the most to the effectiveness of the advisories. Relational analysis through regression was done and it was found that innovative proneness was found significant at 1% level whereas, farming experience, accessibility to digital farm advisories and social media utilization were found to be positively significant at 5% level with effectiveness. The R2 value was found to be 0.56 indicating 56 per cent of the variance in the dependent variable i.e., effectiveness of mobile based digital farm advisories was due to the explained independent variables. Hence these factors to be considered while improving the effective use of the information disseminated through these digital farm advisories.