Assessing the Factors Affecting Sustainable Management of Agricultural Water Resources

Currently, qualitative and quantitative reduction of water resources is a worldwide obstacle. In Iran, this issue has caused many problems for the agriculture sector .this study was mainly aimed at analyzing the sustainable management of agriculture water resources in Azran watershed, Esfahan Province. This is an applied study with descriptive and correlation methods. Factor analysis technique was also used to determine factors affecting the sustainable management of agricultural water resources. Number of the statistical sample consisted 1296 of the farmers in this region, from this population (n= 144) selected through simple random sampling method. Information collected through questionnaire. In the field section, using simple sampling method, information was collected from 12 villages. Coronbach Alpha coefficient was used to evaluate the validity of questionnaire (%85). results indicated that there is a positive and significant relationship at 001/0 between the variable of sustainable management of agriculture water resources and rate of visiting on- farm demonstration , social participation , variables of the rate of using communicative channels , participation in training classes , income , level of mechanization , consulting with other wheat farmers,and rate of the agriculture promoterscontact with wheat farmers. Factor analysis technique was then used to determine factors affecting the level of sustainable management of agricultural water resources. KMO tests used to evaluate the suitability of data for factor analysis; results showed that data is suitable for factor analysis. Results of factor analysis indicated that five factors of economic characteristics, variables of educational and promotional activities, social activities, knowledge and information, and governmental supports explain about 75 percent of the variance of sustainable management of agriculture water resources , meaning that if theses five factors are well considered in different planning ,it can be concluded that improvement of the technical knowledge of Kashan township's wheat farmers in the field of sustainable agriculture is highly covered .