Abstract—This study was carried out to identify agro-economic factors on adoption integrated rice-fish farming by farmers. A survey was conducted using a stratified random sampling to collect data from farmers of selected villages in Guilan province, north of Iran. The questionnaire validity and reliability ware also determined to enhance the dependability of the result. Data were collected from 184 respondents (61 adopters and 123 non-adopters) randomly sampled from selected villages and was analyzed using the Artificial Neural Networks. Results for agronomic independent variables showed correctly that 78.2% were classified from training samples and 71.7% from testing samples. In addition, results for economic independent variables showed correctly that 72.7% were classified from training samples and 71.2% from testing samples. On this basis, agro-economic factors influencing the adoption of integrated rice-fish farming were application of chemical fertilizers, application of herbicides, especially quantity using Diazinon, yearly income from agricultural activities, number animals and accessibility to agricultural organs.

Index Terms—artificial neural networks, rice-fish farming, agro-economic, farmers, north of Iran

Cite: Mohammad Sadegh Allahyari and Seyyed Ali Noorhosseini, "Agro-Economic Factors Determining on Adoption of Rice-Fish Farming: An Application for Artificial Neural Networks," Journal of Advanced Agricultural Technologies, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 151-156, December 2014. Doi: 10.12720/joaat.1.2.151-156