Identifying and Prioritizing the Challenges of Organic Farming Development Among Farmers in Lorestan Province

The purpose of this research is qualitative analysis and prioritize the challenges of organic farming development in Lorestan province, Iran. This research has been conducted from February to December 2022 to provide a comprehensive, and practical model to understand the challenges through grounded theory and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in Lorestan province. The data were collected by performing in-depth semi-structured interviews with the 32 agricultural experts in this field. To measure the validity of this qualitative study, a strategy of triangulation was used and to measure the reliability, constant testing and comparison methods of data and use of tables to record data were used. Data analysis was done by using MAXQDA12 in three steps: open coding, axial coding, and selective coding. The results of this study by grounded theory identified 29 initial codes and seven main following challenges were categorized and by AHP prioritized: lack of technical knowledge, skills and motivation in the field of organic production, weakness in the information and advertising network in the field of organic consumption, weakness in management and human resources of organic training courses, lack of financial resources and credits for organic training courses, structural and content weakness of organic training courses, weakness of modern research regarding organic agriculture and lack of awareness of the relative advantage of organic agriculture.