A Study On Key Farmers And Their Social Network Characteristics In Agricultural Materials Products Sales

Recently more and more events about false pesticide,seed and fertilizer(for example,Baidu can find more than 1000000 news reports about counterfeit Agricultural materials products),make the agricultural materials market appear serious trust crisis.They also seriously hamper agricultural production order,and harm the produce quality safety and interests of farmers.So how to rebuild trust mechanism to resolve trust crisis in agricultural materials market has become a topic of common concern for the government,scholars and farmers.The subject in the sales of agricultural materials products is farmers.The kinship relationships and geopolitical relationships constitute the peasant individual-level relationship network.The behavior in the network is the social interaction between farmers.Frequent social interactions produce two direct results,that is,familiarity and communication experience,both of which are important factors for the generation of interpersonal trust in social networks.In the social network of rural areas,farmers have limited access to information,coupled with the low education level of farmers,which severely restricts the scope of their access to agricultural materials retailer information.So the farmers often have certain risks when choosing agricultural materials retailers.In order to avoid this risk,in general,farmers often seek advice from farmers who have higher trust in the network before selecting agricultural materials retailers.Farmers with high trust have become key farmers in the network.Therefore,to solve the crisis of trust in the sale of agricultural materials,it is particularly important to acquire key farmers.Based on the theoretical perspective of social network and interpersonal trust,this paper constructs a social network graph of peasants,abstracts the hierarchical structure of social relations according to the “six-degree separation theory,” proposes a method for calculating the trust of farmers in social networks,and applies this method to the empirical research.Two villages are randomly selected from the central and western regions as the research object.A total of 37 questionnaires are collected in the central region,46 questionnaires are collected in the western region.And Ucinet software is used to construct the social network graph of the two regions to calculate the trust degree of farmers in the two regions.Ucinet software is used to analyze the centrality of the farmers in the two regions,and the key nodes in the network are identified by combining the degree of trust and the betweenness centrality.The study finds that there are key farmers in the central region,but the key farmers in the western region are not obvious.In view of this phenomenon,the reason of difference about the key farmers between the central and western regions are explained from the individual network characteristics(structure hole,relationship strength and relationship amount)and overall network characteristics(network density and centrality potential).Finally,for the different network structure,the sales suggestions for agricultural retailers are put forward.