Informationsbehov vid ett unikt beslut : en studie av sockerbetsodlare i södra Skåne

Abstract: For many years, sugar beets have been the most profitable crop for farmers with suitable growing prerequisites. During year 2007 when the grain prices increased and the EU reform decreased the payment for sugarbeets, it was no longer obvious to grow sugar beets in the crop sequence. With the latest agricultural reform in mind, farming has turned to a more open market and that is important for the independent farmer to adjust to the prevailing market presumptions. In the theory, scientists distinguish between unique and repetitive decisions. Unique decisions can be described as decisions made ones or not often. The opposite, repetitive decisions are decisons that have been made several times before. Sugar beet is a special crop that needs special machines that only can be used in sugar beet production. To deliver sugar beets you also need a quota which restraint the total area of sugar beets in Sweden. It is therefore a big process to stop growing sugar beets which makes me interpret it as a unique decision. There is a large shortage in knowledge about how a farmer makes his/her decisions, with the consequence that the information that is obtainable can not be used fully by the farmers. The whole decision process has been studied in other working disciplines but only a few have been done about farmers. This master thesis consists of a qualitative study with deep interviews with six sugar beet farmers in the southern part of Scania. The selection of these was made from an inquiry that was sent to twenty growers, randomly chosen from the sugarproducer, Daniscos member register. Out of these twenty, sixteen answered the inquiry. The questions in the inquiry were formulated in a way that made it easy to distinguish if they were only intuitive or even analytic in a larger or smaller perspective. The six growers chosen showed variation in their decision making as well as their farm size. To get a bigger and truer picture of the beet growers, these were categorized into three groups with two in each. The point of making it a case study was to describe the reality, by only knowing a small piece of the course of event. The results from the interviews show that the beet growers in this study mainly trust their own experience in the unique decision to go on growing sugar beets during year 2008. On the other hand there is a big difference between how much intutive respectively analytical they have been in their decisions. The perceived given prerequisites a farm can offer was often the determinant of how analytical the farmers have been as decision makers. The size of the farms did not affect whether the beet grower is more analytical or not. However, the inspectors of the two largest farms were both analytical, one more than the other. The work category farmers are not a homogenous group, which explains why they do not prefer the same information channels. It is consistently shown in the interviews that all farmers read a lot of information about sugar beets. However, they prefer oral information coming from a counselor or an expert. The beet growers that consults a counselor of any kind puts a big trust to what they get recommended. Of the papers read by them all, "Betodlaren" is the one that is thought to publish the most useful information.