Pistachio Timely Management Sites: A Platform for Improving Knowledge Flow and Sustainble Development of Pistachio

Background and objectives: Pistachio is one of Iran’s most strategic agricultural crops and a major source of non-oil exports. However, declining yields threaten the country’s leading global position. To address this challenge, the nationwide "Pistachio Timely Management Project" was implemented across 13 major pistachio-producing provinces. The project was built on two main components: establishing pistachio timely management model sites and training professional pistachio extension agents. Timely management model sites were based on an Iranian extension method called “extension comprehensive model site,” or “extension model site”. The present research was conducted with the aim of in-depth investigating the effects and consequences of the timely management project and the mechanism of their emergence.
Materials and methods: The research method was qualitative content analysis. Data were collected through in-depth interviews with key informants, namely 13 extension agents, a relevant expert, and the project leader. The participants were from 11 cities in 8 provinces. A protocol directed the data collection process during the interviews. The interviews lasted between 30 and 72 minutes, and a total of 429 minutes of interviews were conducted with an average of 38 minutes per interview. The executive procedure of the analysis of the interview transcripts based on an inductive qualitative content analysis consisted of five steps, including identifying semantic units, coding, forming subcategories, forming categories, and forming themes. In these stages, an inductive summarization process occurred while moving from less abstraction to more abstraction and interpretation. MAXQDA24 software was used to manage and analyze the data.
Results: Inductive qualitative content analysis resulted in a total of 217 primary codes, 86 subcategories, and 44 categories. The extracted concepts were organized into seven themes, including “project leader competencies”, “features of the training provided in model sites”, “characteristics of training provided for extension agents”, “contextual intervening factors”, “problems in organizing the timely management project”, “results and consequences of the timely management project”, and “solutions to improve the timely management project”.
Conclusion: The findings were synthesized into a conceptual model. The project leader’s leadership, scientific expertise, professional competence, personal attributes, and knowledge brokerage has led to the effectiveness of both farmer and extension agent training. Influenced by contextual factors (farmer potential, crop potential, supporting factors, cost of recommendations and time-consuming nature of agriculture), this effectiveness resulted in improved knowledge exchange, farmer and extension agent empowerment, timely orchard management, greater adoption of improved practices, optimized input use, higher farmer income, reduced environmental impacts, and strengthened research and development activities. In addition, the project suffered from organizing problems, including insufficient support for the project and the lack of proper justification of the project for the provincial managers. Finally, regarding the project's positive results, by mitigating the weaknesses, it is suggested that the project be continued and this model be extended to other crops. In this regard, improvement strategies should be considered, including documentation of lessons learned, more administrative and financial support, greater use of active learning, improved scheduling of extension agents' training courses, and more accurate selection of extension agents. Findings on project leader competencies can be used to select suitable researchers to collaborate in extension programs, and extension managers and extension workers can use findings on farmers' potential to determine selection criteria for extension pilots. Finally, one of the important impacts of the project has been the facilitation of knowledge flow, which shows that the proper implementation of extension programs using efficient researchers and extension workers and appropriate methods (such as model sites) can help improve knowledge flow and the sustainability of the agricultural sector.