FARMERS' SMART AGRICULTURAL PERCEPTION AND TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION: THE MEDIATING ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

This study set out to examine the effect of farmers' perception on smart agricultural technology adoption and to assess the mediating role of social media in that relationship, using primary data from 102 farmers analysed through descriptive statistics, correlation, and multiple regression. The findings show that facilitating conditions and social influence are the most consistent and statistically significant drivers of both technology adoption and social media engagement, while farmers' general perception and perceived usefulness carry limited independent explanatory power once these enabling factors are accounted for. Social media engagement, while strongly correlated with adoption, is better understood as sharing common antecedents with adoption, principally facilitating conditions and perceived benefit, than as an independent causal mediator. These findings offer a more infrastructure- and community-centred picture of smart agricultural technology adoption than purely attitudinal models would suggest, and they carry direct implications for how policymakers, extension agencies, and agri-tech firms should sequence their interventions to accelerate the transition toward sustainable, technology-enabled farming.

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