Factors Affecting the Farmer-to-Comsumer Direct Marketing and Its influence on the Sale Increase of Agricultural Products

Farm-to-consumer direct marketing increasingly has been recognized as an attractive marketing alternative by farm operators, since producers can receive a better price by selling products directly to consumers. The purpose of this study is twofold. Using the census of agriculture of 2010, we first estimated a hierarchical logit model to identify factors affecting farmer-to-consumer direct marketing chosen by farmers. Then we used an ordinal logit model to estimate the relationship between the farmer-to-comsumer direct marketing business and the increase in sales of agricultural products. The results show that socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of individual as well as various regional environments influence farmers' choices of direct marketing. 16.7% of total variances were explained by regional environments such as accessibility, the number of various distributional facilities, and exchanges between cities and rural areas in farmers’ choice of direct marketing. Also, a farmer who runs a farmer-to-consumer directing marketing business has almost 1.3 times higher odds of increasing agricultural sale revenue than one who does not run the direct marketing business.