The Knowledge Management Model for Cost Reduction and Marketing Practices of Farmers of the Rice Seed Centres in the North of Thailand: The Power of Knowledge in Less Competitive Agricultural Market
The major problems of farmers in the north of Thailand are unstable market and the use traditional production methods. Most of them have lower income than workers in other sectors of the country. Many evidences clearly show that knowledge is a critical factor in this situation.The success of managing available and incoming knowledge will determine how much farmers can increase their products and income, and finally reduce income inequality of the region.
Based on the data collected from farmers in the Rice Seed Centre, a government supported groups (to produce and distribute rice seeds to all farmers) in the 17 provinces in the north of Thailand, the objectives of this research are: first, to study cost reduction and marketing practices of farmers; second, to study knowledge management practices related to cost reduction and marketing of farmers and third, to develop knowledge management model related to cost reduction and marketing practices of farmers in the Rice Seed Centre in the north of Thailand.
Data from the questionnaires indicate that main problems are in cost reduction (such as how to reduce number of seeds in the field and how to use less fertiliser and pesticide), land preparation, farm management and marketing (such as market uncertainty and new marketing channels). From the interviews of several national and provincial farmer leaders, results confirm that most farmers feel comfortable to do what they did in the past. Reasons may not come from their lacks of knowledge alone but from adjustment cost from traditional to new management and farming practices. To solve this problem, attitude of the farmers must be changed first. To reduce production cost, farmers should use small but productive farming area, and use local organic fertiliser and pesticide . On marketing side, they should create farmers networks to expand marketing channels and sale only selected quality product. The basis of all these solutions is to have strong leadership to demonstrate the use of new knowledge and to make farmers understand the holistic view of working procedures and all related practical knowledge.
From all the evidences above, we propose Integrated Production-Marketing Model. The essence of the model is to use marketing part to identify product demand, the quality of products and market channels, and use production part to lay out where farmers could reduce cost. Knowledge management model that fit all these task is the Collective Problem-Solving Knowledge Management (CPS-KM). This model concentrates on the most important knowledge first and collect all related and important knowledge from inside and outside organisation and then follow all necessary knowledge management processes.