Perception to Action of Mohr County of Fars Province Farmers towards Confrontation with Drought

Drought is a recurrent socio-natural hazard that increases its magnitude due to climate change. The main objective of this study was to identify farmers' perceptions of drought and their stratagems for dealing with this weather change event. For this purpose, 250 farmers in the Mohr county, south of Fars province, were selected by stratified random sampling and were interviewed using a researcher-made questionnaire. The validity of the questionnaire was confirmed by agricultural extension and development experts, and their reliability was confirmed by pilot study and Cronbach's alpha coefficient. The results of exploratory factor analysis showed that the perception of drought can be attributed to four factors, namely experience, memory, expectation and definition, which in totally these factors explain more than 71 percent of the variance of drought perception. Another finding of this study indicated that farmers have used various strategies such as farm production management, water demand management, financial management, production technology management, water supply management, soil management and reactive management to deal with this climatic event. Moreover, the relationship between drought perception and dealing strategies was positive and significant. In addition, the results of ANOVA test showed that perceptual clusters had a significant difference in terms of dealing strategies; So that farmers with a high level of perception (third cluster), in comparison with other groups, had a higher mean in this regard. The results of this study can be effective to understanding the social aspects of agricultural societies and planning for public and private adaptation/mitigation strategies to drought.