Computer use and attitudes for a sample of Canterbury, New Zealand dairy farmers

Abstract

With the objective of collecting data for assessing research hypotheses about information management, a mail survey was carried out on Canterbury dairy farmers between July and August of 2000. From a total of 537 questionnaires sent, 300 were received, resulting in 290 usable responses. This report describes the average farm, farm sizes, the manager's dairy farming experience and age, tenancy, education, management teams, non-family people giving a reasonable input into farm decision making, farm office equipment used, computer use, software utilisation, information sources, internet use, farmer goals, and farmer opinions about information management. While almost three quarters of the farmers own a computer, 61% are using computerised systems to manage farm information. Financial management was the most common use of computers with 54.48% of the farmers using them in this way, followed by the livestock area with 35.17%, while only 16.9% of the farmers were using software to support their feed management. Farmers using computerised systems were younger, more educated, and more profit oriented than non-users. This group managed bigger farms, they have been farming less time both in Canterbury and in total, and they also used farm advisers more extensively in their decision making, and they spent more time doing office work.