Applying Action Research to Farmer Direct Marketing－Using Yunlin County's Black Peanuts as an Example

• Main Authors: Tsai Pei Ling, 蔡佩伶
• Other Authors: Yen-Chun Juan
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/hdb2dt

碩士 === 明志科技大學 === 工業工程與管理研究所 === 102 === Hunger breeds discontentment. Providing food to the public is the most basic and important economic activity. Many countries treat low “food self-sufficiency rate” as an issue of national security, e.g. rate fell below 40% in 2010 in Japan. In Taiwan, the rate has dropped to 32% after joining the WTO therefore should receive substantial attention from the government and the society. The “law of supply” in economics hypothesizes high supply responds in high price. In other words, quantity of supply（such as agricultural products）can be increased by raising the price. However, the “price” consumers pay for the products does not equal to the “net profit” farmers earn. In the production and marketing system, farmers have to share the profit with middlemen including wholesalers, jobbers and retailers based on their individual contribution. Besides, farmers have to pay for the costs of production including fertilizers, pesticides and wages. The net profit needs to be increased should target on the farmers who are the product providers. If we assume the cost of production is fixed, the only way of increasing the net profit of farmers is to increase their profit proportion within the production and marketing system. The farmers need to gain these additional profits by sharing workload of other members in this supply chain. This study takes Yunlin King Box Peanuts（a.k.a. black peanuts） as an example to investigate the possibilities of farmers replacing partial service provided by jobbers under the current production and marketing system in Taiwan traditional agriculture. Conducted as an action research, I utilize the existing manpower and hardware and software resources to replace the middlemen through Internet marketing. Upcoming issues for farmers at different stages of Internet marketing and the difficulties in replacing middlemen are further discussed. Developing of new production and marketing models to gradually removing these obstacles will maximize the profit of farmers.