Measuring the impact of an intensive commodity price risk management education program on agricultural producers

The purposes of the study were to measure change in knowledge, adoption ofpractices, and economic impact, and to investigate relationships between selectedpersonal and business parameters, and satisfaction, knowledge, adoption of practices,and economic impact of the Master Marketer program and marketing clubs.A census was attempted to collect data from the 520 Master Marketer graduatesand 1,058 marketing club members. Using recommendations from Dillman (2000), datafrom participants were collected using two mail questionnaires. This process yielded326 usable responses from Master Marketer graduates for a return rate of 62.7%, and 407usable responses from marketing club members for a response rate of 38.4%.Master Marketer respondents had a statistically significant increase in selfperceivedknowledge with a change in mean score of 2.06 (pre-knowledge mean = 3.33,post-knowledge mean = 5.40, where 1 = low, and 7 = excellent). Using a paired samplest-test, the 2-tail level of significance was beyond the .05 level of significance. Marketingclub respondents also showed a statistically significant increase in self-perceivedknowledge.Adoption of price risk management practices was measured with an adjustedresponse scale ranging from 0 to 12. Master Marketer respondents showed a pre-meanscore of 3.15, a post-mean score of 6.61, and a change of 3.46. The 2-tailed level ofsignificance for the overall adoption scale was less than 0.01. Marketing clubrespondents also showed a statistically significant increase in adoption of these practices.Economic impact in terms of change in net income was derived usingrespondents?? self-reported changes in commodity price received for each commodityproduced, and each respondent??s typical level of production. The total farm impact had amean of $32,288. The 2-tailed level of significance for the total farm impact was lessthan 0.01. The mean impact per farm of $12,361 for marketing club respondents wasalso statistically significant.For Master Marketer respondents, notable findings with respect to the correlationof independent variable with dependent variables was total gross revenue was negativelycorrelated with knowledge change. Participants who reported a large change inknowledge tended to also report a large change (increase) in time spent on marketing.