Factors Associated with Extension Programme Participation: The case of discussion groups for Irish cattle farmers.

With agricultural extension being an important method of knowledge transfer and promoting innovation, we explore the factors associated with extension participation in the case of Irish cattle farmers. The cattle sector has a high reliance on direct payments and off farm employment is prevalent; we explore how these factors affect extension participation making use of data from a government funded extension program. By applying a sequential logit model, we found that subsidy dependence and off farm employment both had a significant and negative impact on participation