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Introduction
The livestock/poultry sector has opened new horizons for addressing food and other requirements of our ever-growing population. Now it is regarded as the era of white revolution (milk) which, in combination with meat and egg production, all play a vital role to meet human food requirements. The livestock sector has offered multiple benefits to farmers in terms of food security and poverty reduction by increasing rural income (Akhtar et al., 2008). However, animal production, especially under hot tropical conditions is still below optimal levels and there is still ample room for production improvement. To achieve improved production levels, women will have to develop new skills and learn to manage and manipulate various inputs including relevant agricultural technology knowledge and skills. This view is consistent with the position of Stanley (1990) who saw knowledge, in the form of information, as one of the basic human needs after air, water, food, and shelter; and thus it be said to be one of the basic necessities of life. Camble (1992) indicates that humans require technological information to be able to manipulate factors of production such as land, labor, and capital resources into meaningful and productive use.
Thus, the technical information related to poultry production improvement should be disseminated to the rural community to enhance their income levels (Hashmi et al., 2007) and improve the performance of local chicken production systems, without hindering the sustainability of chicken production. However (Sonaiya, 2004), there is a need to create awareness among women regarding their rights to obtain chicken production information through various agencies (including extension agents, non- governmental organization (NGO) and mass media) to uplift their decision-making process concerning various poultry activities for increasing poultry production (Arshad et al., 2010). On the other side, chicken information does not reach the majority of the women in the agricultural sector. In spite of that, rural women contribute significantly in almost all activities related to poultry and livestock production to improve household food security. Furthermore, this contributes towards providing additional income to families from the sale of chicken products to help with the hard economic situation. While men’s contribution remains the central, often the sole, focus of attention leaving the women outside the mainstream of information (Samanta et al., 1997). It is well known that information dissemination of livestock production skills is still limited for rural women in México.
Gender relations in agriculture have increased in recent years, particularly in international organizations like UN, World Bank and FAO. The topic of gender warrants being an important issue for Mayan women producing backyard chicken in Yucatan as the majority of production systems are managed by women (Clendinnen, 2013). Thus, it will be important to define with women what their preferred methods of learning are and who can provide information on poultry production to them.
Information dissemination, either through face-to-face contact or using mass media may help reach women of varying personalities and different skill levels. At present, women seem to depend on traditional information sources such as family members and neighbors/friends as it is the case in other latitudes (Fawole, 2006). Therefore, poultry production information dissemination may still need an overall evolution leading to proper information dissemination. It is important to determine what are the sources of information and the dissemination procedures that could benefit more women farmers of different socioeconomic strata to improve the living standards in Mexico. Focus group studies have recently been used to characterize the attitudes and opinions of participants in Mexico (Tuttle, 2007; Dragon and Place, 2006). However, these studies are still limited in this field especially among rural women in the Mayan region of Yucatan. In this context the current study used focus group discussions (FGDs) with the aim to (a) describe the current sources of information acquisition including the various areas of chicken practices amongst Mayan women; (b) identify the methods that would be preferred by backyard chicken producers to obtain information for chicken production; and (c) identify the constraints affecting information acquisition amongst Mayan women producing poultry in the Mayan region of Yucatan, Mexico, which negatively impact poultry production.
Materials and Methods
Study site
The study was performed in Yucatán which is located in the northern part of the Yucatán peninsula in Mexico (Bautista et al., 2005); the communities of the state of Yucatan are distributed into 106 municipalities. The present study was conducted in Chacsinkin municipality at the south of Yucatán, located about 111 kilometers from Mérida (the capital city of Yucatán State), and Cuauhtémoc village which is located in Izamal municipality at the east of Yucatán distant about 71 kilometers from Merida city (INEG1, 2011).
Sample selection
Women with backyard chicken production in Chacksinkin and Cuauhtémoc villages were included in this study. Participants were selected based on skills level of backyard chicken production practices. A proportion stratification distribution was followed based on a preliminary survey that was conducted to assign the skills level categories of respondents in the same studied villages during the period of May to August 2013. The survey described the skills level of rural women on their chicken production practices (feeding, housing, health care, management and purpose of production) through a questionnaire designed for studying the skill level of backyard chicken owners in some villages of Yucatan, México. Women were classified into three strata (high, medium and low skills level). Those skill categories formed the framework in the two villages to select participants for subsequent FGDs. Within each village, three focus group sessions were held involving 10-12 participants each (a total of 65 participants in the two villages). Participation of women was achieved through invitations of the assigned women for each group.
Data collection
The FGDs were used to collect qualitative data through six focus group sessions. A skilled moderator facilitated each session and was supported by two assistants who recorded the responses on flip charts and kept notes. To preclude the introduction of bias into the discussion, the moderator did not have formal association with the participants (Erlander et al., 1993). Each session lasted approximately two hours. The FGDs were recorded on flip charts through several closed questions (Table 1). Choices of answers were put in form of photos to allow the interaction among participants, especially amongst those that could not read or write. Additionally, face-to-face individual interviews were held using a pre-designed questionnaire to collect data about socio-economic characteristics of participants. Finally, in order to improve chicken information acquisition sources for rural women, key informant interviews (KIIs) were also applied considering suggestions or recommendations from the high skills level category through open-ended questions.
Data analysis
Data were analyzed using quantitative and qualitative methods. Data obtained from the FGDs were classified into the different skills categories recorded in the two villages studied. Descriptive statistics like frequency distribution, percentages, range, mean and standard deviation were presented on tables so as to enable the comparison of data amongst different groups. Data were analyzed using the Log linear Model of SAS 9.2 program (SAS Institute, Cary, North Carolina, USA) to measure the effect of independent variables (the different groups and the two studied villages) on the applicability of dependent variable (information acquiring sources) and their interactions for statistical significance. Differences between the two studied villages were considered significant at p≤0.05. The statistical model used was as follow:
where µ: represents overall mean, m ijk : denote the corresponding multinomial cell probabilities for i= 1, 2, j=1, 2 and k=1, 2, 3. λ S : denoted the application of information acquisition sources (i=yes or no); λ V : denoted the studied villages (j=Chacksinkin and Cuauhtémoc); λ G : represented the groups’ skills level (k=low, medium and high skills level). The interaction either between V and G (λ jK VG ) or among S, V and G (λ ijk SVG ) were insignificant, so they were removed from the final statistical model.
Results and Discussion
Socio-economic characteristics
A total of 65 rural women participated in the focus groups. Table 2 shows the participants’ ages, ranging between 20 and 70 years in Chacksinkin. Meanwhile, they were between 24 and 61 years in Cuauhtémoc. This indicates that both young and elderly women were involved in chicken production activities. This result agrees with the finding of Canul et al. (2011) who mentioned that all poultry producers in central and southern of Yucatan are interested in receiving technical information to improve their production systems. Also, similar findings were reported by Igben (1988) and Tosho (2005) in Nigeria.
Table 2 Socio - economic characteristics of participants with different skill levels of chicken production practices in two rural villages of Yucatán, México (N=65).
F: Frequency, Source: Focus Group Discussions, 2014.
The participants’ family size ranged from 2 to 12 family members in Chacksinkin and from 2 to 10 family members in Cuauhtémoc, including women, husbands, children and other family dependents such as grandparents. These results are in accordance with the findings of Gutiérrez-Triay et al. (2007) who reported 73.00 % of the backyard chicken families, with a range from 1 to 10 family members in one of the rural communities of Yucatan.
Furthermore, chicken production experience ranged from 4 and 50 years in both villages. This study showed also that all participants can be classified as small-holders because all participants have from 2 to 40 chickens. In this regard, the finding of Gutierrez-Ruiz et al. (2013) reported that the women keeping backyard chicken in some rural communities of Yucatan have from 1 to 73 chickens.
Most of participants in the study were married across the three skill levels categories in Chacksinkin and Cuauhtémoc (Table 2). The implication of this finding is that married women are commonly involved in chicken production in order to produce their own poultry meat and eggs. Similar results were reported by Anwar (2003) who found that the majority (88.18 %) of respondents in their study were married women. More than half of the participants in the two villages have at least primary education, which is expected to be positively associated to their capability of receiving information from all communication channels, including reading materials (Oduwole et al., 2013). This result shows the lower educational level of Mayan women in the study areas, which could be found in the majority of Mayan women, especially older ones, who speak only Mayan language in their daily life, unlike the majority of men who speak Spanish and Mayan languages because they sometimes go to work in neighboring areas and need to speak Spanish also.
Information acquisition sources
Mass media sources
Data presented in Table 3 show a significant usage (p=0.01) of radio, in Mayan language as a mass media source for acquiring information on chicken production practices amongst the overall participants. The importance of radio as a source of chicken production information amongst chicken producers is similar to that reported by Muhammad et al. (2012) and Okwu et al. (2007) who revealed that radio was an important source in the dissemination of information amongst farmers regarding various fields including livestock and poultry. The utilization of pamphlets for acquiring information by participants varied significantly (p=0.02) between the two villages; where, participants who used pamphlets for information acquisition, compared with who did not use this source, were higher in Cuauhtémoc village than in Chacksinkin. The latter could be due to the fact that participants in Cuauhtémoc had received information on chicken production practices through training programs from a governmental organization as reported by them. The least used sources of information were newspapers, posters and books. The latter may be due to the low literacy level amongst the participants. These results are similar to those reported by Yahaya (2002) and Tologbonse et al. (2006), who reported that printed media such as newspapers, extension bulletins/newsletters, posters and hand bills are poorly used by small-scale farmers due to the low literacy level of the rural farmers. However, it could be more relevant that there are not public libraries in the study villages, thus no books are available with the relevant information. Also, it is not common to include animal production information in the Yucatan’s newspapers or in the national newspapers in general.
Interpersonal sources used and preferred
An outstanding result of the present study is that the direct personal communication is a very important source of technical information for chicken production technology amongst backyard chicken farmers. It had higher relative importance amongst participants compared to mass media. The direct personal communication is used very frequently to receive information of backyard chicken production practices in both villages. The important interpersonal sources of information on poultry production either used or preferred (Table 4 and 5) were family members as well as friends/neighbors (p<0.05) which were considered as traditional sources. These findings confirmed that rural women in the Mayan region still depend on knowledge, skills and experiences gained locally from one generation to the next (Clendinnen, 2013). The present results suggest that the studied rural communities are closed societies not open to the outside world in respect of backyard chicken production. Thus, they depend mainly on conventional learning scheme between members of the same community. Data in Table 5 revealed that family as well as friends/neighbors, are the preferred information sources of chicken production, in addition, there were significant family and neighbors with group interaction (p<0.05), where the preference of these sources for acquiring information increased while the skills level of respondents in the studied villages decreased. That could be explained as the low skills level groups prefer the traditional sources (family and friends) along with the modern sources (trainers/specialists, veterinarian, demonstrations and extension agents) which indicates that participants still need more information from the traditional sources to improve their skills level beside the modern sources, unlike the higher skills level groups who preferred mainly the modern sources because they depended much on the traditional sources to reach their high skills level and they did not expect to increase their skills level through these sources so they preferred the modern sources for obtaining more information. Other researchers have also reported the importance of friends, neighbors and personal experience as important sources of poultry information amongst farmers in Nigeria (Yahaya, 2002; Okwu and Daudu, 2011) who reported that friends/neighbors and family jointly as source of information occupied the third position in the ranking order. Another important source of information were the own- personal experience and feed suppliers (p<0.05) which were also considered traditional sources used (Table 4). The importance of considering the own experience should be relevant for future training programs as it means that they give a value to their own experience in the generation of their own technology. Thus, this should not be de-valorized by trainers or extension materials. On the other hand, the importance of feed suppliers as a source of information is something that, to the best of our knowledge, has not been reported elsewhere before. The latter imply that women may feel confident to obtain information on chicken production and health from feed suppliers.
Table 4 Interpersonal used sources of information acquisition on chicken practices for participants with different skill levels of chicken production practices in two rural villages of Yucatan, Mexico.
S: The source used, G: Group, V: Village, *Is significant at p≤0.05 level.
Table 5 Interpersonal preferred sources of information acquisition on chicken practices for participants with different skill levels of chicken production practices in two rural villages of Yucatán, México.
S: The source preferred, G: Group, V: Village,*Is significant at p≤0.05 level.
Another salient result of the present study was to find that rural women reported that they would prefer to obtain chicken production information from trainers/ specialists and demonstrations which are modern sources for acquiring information among the overall participants (p<0.05; Table 5). However, the usage of trainers/specialists and demonstration methods were different (p<0.05) between participants from Chacksinkin and those from Cuauhtémoc. The latter can be explained as the participants in Cuauhtémoc village received information in chicken production from trainers and specialists during training programs which did not occur amongst Chacksinkin women. While participants in Chacksinkin were exposed to demonstration methods, through the current chicken production development project for acquiring skills on chicken production practices (Table 4). These previous results are consistent with Brent et al. (2000) who reported that the two most useful sources of information were livestock technical specialists and demonstration methods, which were chosen because they are frequently used among the highest rated information sources. Data in Table 5 showed a high preference rating for extension agents and veterinarian services (p<0.05). The latter may be attributed to the interpersonal interaction and immediate feedback enjoyed by the farmers. The findings obtained for the used and preferred sources showed that the most important interpersonal sources used were traditional sources (family, friends/neighbors, own-personal experience, feed suppliers). However, the most preferred ones in the two studied villages were family and friends/neighbors as traditional sources; in addition to trainers, demonstration, veterinarian services and extension agents as modern sources. In order to improve their managerial skills and knowledge of backyard chicken production practices for rural women it is important to include another modern method along with the traditional sources.
The age of information acquisition
A third result of the present study is the age at which the participants began acquiring information on backyard chicken production (Table 6). The results showed that the number of participants who obtained their information on chicken production very early in life (5-10 years old) were higher (p=0.02) in comparison with participants who get their information in the other age stages. It could be inferred from this result that the participants at this age stage may have more capacity for receiving and learning information on backyard chicken production. This result confirms the findings of Schnitkey et al. (1992) and Tosho (2005) who mentioned that age is related to receive information; younger farmers may receive information more desirable or assimilation than older farmers.
Recipients who receive information regarding chicken production practices from participants
Table 6 showed that the number of participants who transferred their information about chicken production to their family members including children and grandchildren was significantly higher (p=0.01) than those who did not transfer their information to their family members. The latter suggests that the tradition to transfer chicken production knowledge and skills, from one generation of Mayan women to the next, still exists. This result agrees with Arivanandan (2012) in India who reported that family support is an important factor to improve the education performance of children through the village information centers as development agents.
Themes regarding chicken production practices acquired through information sources
Nearly all participants (95-100 %) obtained the information regarding chicken production in the areas of feed and feeding, housing system, diseases control, marketing and reproduction in both villages. This is an indication of the diverse themes of chicken production that are important for rural women. This result is logical because rural women need all the information required to be as self-reliant as possible from external sources of chicken production information as soon as possible. The most used sources of information in the areas of feed and feeding and disease control were family, friends/neighbors and feed suppliers in both villages, beside training programs which were conducted in Cuauhtémoc and demonstration methods which were applied in Chacksinkin, in that order. Results also revealed that family and own-personal experience, in that order were the major sources of information used by participants in the areas of housing system, marketing and reproduction. Similar results reported by Oyeyinka et al. (2011) who found that the respondents obtained the information regarding poultry production in the areas of improving housing system, feeds and feeding, diseases/parasites prevention and control, marketing strategies through radio, family, friends and feed suppliers.
Constraints affecting information acquisition of chicken production practices
Regarding the constraints to access chicken production information, this study found that all the participants in Chacksinkin and around 97 % of them in Cuauhtémoc reported that the unavailability of extension agents was the most important constraint. With the exception of very few NGO services, the extension services in the rural areas of Mexico, including Yucatán, for backyard/subsistence chicken production systems have been nearly non-existing. During the seventies and eighties the Mexican Federal government together with the Yucatan State government started financial services for rural areas that included extension services for activities such as pig production, chicken production or cattle production. This was an attempt to diversify the agronomic activities away from the sisal monoculture. However, both the Federal and the State governments decided to shut all the livestock extension services as a measure to cut-down “paternalist” policies, although, it could have been more the result of the highly inefficacious services they provided as well as the rampant corruption that prevailed in those financial entities (Talamante et al., 1994). The present study shows that, in spite of the negative experiences of the past, rural women in the Mayan region declared that they need efficient extension services to improve backyard chicken production practices. This finding agrees with Ogunwale et al. (2006) who reported that contact with extension agents and the use of various recommendations had positive impact on the chicken production practices. These women mentioned that the high cost of veterinary services is another constraint for 88 % of women in Chacksinkin and 97 % of women in Cuauhtémoc. These results are in agreement with Fawole (2006) who mentioned that the farmers feel that the cost of veterinary services (66 %) and non-availability of extension agents (63 %) are severe constrains to access poultry production information.
Conclusion
This study has shown that the rural women in Chacsinkin and Cuauhtémoc still depend mainly on the usual traditional sources (family, friends/ neighbors, own-personal experience and feed suppliers) for acquiring their knowledge and experience locally from one generation to the next. However, if women had the need to learn more about chicken production they would still prefer to obtain the information from family and friends/ neighbors as traditional sources but they also consider important to obtain information from expert training, demonstrations, veterinarian and extension agents, which are considered modern sources of information in their conditions to improve their managerial skills and knowledge of backyard chicken production practices.
Recommendations by key informants
The key informants from this study presented the following suggestions for improving backyard chicken information acquisition sources for Mayan women:
Extension agents and veterinary services should be provided for rural women as modern preferred sources of information acquisition to improve their knowledge and managerial skills of backyard chicken production practices.
The use of conventional mass media such as radio, television or newspapers should also be used to reach farmers in order to provide needed information.
There is the need for women-oriented training programs preferably in language through community participation their and this may lead to improve their managerial skills and knowledge of backyard chicken production practices.
Acknowledgements
This research work was funded by the scholarship awarded to the first author by International Center for Development and Decent Work (ICDD) and the Mexican National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT).
