Taiwan has a relatively short history in the development of sustainable agriculture. As cognition is a critical step in the adoption of an innvoation, finding out factors that affect farmers' cognition of sustainable agriculture will be useful in the promotion and education of the topic. This study approaches the issue from farmers' background information, communication factors and economic factors to investigate how these factors affect their consciousness of environmental problems, their cognition of sustainable agriculture and how these factors are mutually related.
105 farmers are randomly selected from 1,857 formally registered pear farmers in Shin-shieh and Tung Shih of Taichung County and Tzou-lang of Miao-li county for interviews. Data are analyzed by simple percentage, Fisher's LSD, ANOVA and Stepwise regression.
