Research on decision making on sales channel choices of farmers, especially in direct sales

Csíkné Mácsai, Éva – Lehota, József

Keywords: direct sales, market, sales channel, producer organization (PO), cluster analysis

Our research – in which farmers were interviewed – has established that farms deal-ing with different sales channels possess different characteristics of farming and work organisation. According our – non representative – survey three groups of farms can be defined: farms dealing with direct sales, farms which are members of producer or-ganisations and farms which use different sales channels.
The main direct sales channel of farmers using direct sales is markets; they regularly produce on small farms and have relatively low agricultural income. Their main goal – like farms using other sales channels – is to produce high quality products and to maintain the current level of farming. In addition they want to improve the positive judgement of their business by their customers. Farmers using different sales channels deal with direct sales as additional source of income and for them it is a form of diver-sification. Farmers who are members of producer organisations (PO)s sell their prod-ucts mostly through POs, but they use other sales channels more often than farmers using direct sales.
Based on the research it can be established that sustaining their level of production has more importance than development and expansion. One explanation for this is the actual economic environment. Reaching the highest level of income is a main factor for all of them.
As opposed to other clusters, farmers using direct sales attach great importance to the recognition of their profession, the values of the region and the expansion of the rate of direct sales.
On the contrary, farmers selling their products via POs set a higher value on the in-troduction of new technologies and on expansion of non-agricultural income, while farms using several sales channels do so on the expansion of the size of the farms.
Based on these results it can be concluded that for farmers using direct sales the de-velopment and growth of their farms is of less importance because they appreciate the social values.

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