Abstract
The dual-fold purpose of this study was to investigate whether there was a correlation between agricultural information and beef cattle farming and to analyze what improving information services had an effect on beef cattle farming. Evaluations of the impact mechanism between beef cattle farming and prevailing conditions were fundamentally the same for the farmers or the civil servants and staff members of PAIs (Public Agricultural Institutions). All information elements had large and minus relation index values. Both responding groups thought that the change in elements involving beef cattle farming easily improved information services, whereas it did not strongly affect beef cattle farming or prevailing conditions. The Decision-Making and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method, which separates the interacting elements of a system into cause and effect groups as a structural modeling approach, is a good technique for analyzing the correlation between pairs of elements. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was applied to the total relation matrix to find out the extent of the cause-effect relationship on the results. The features or correlations within all elements, based on patterns of similarity between the cause or effect groups, were confirmed. The evaluation of the information itself in the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) results was not the same as the magnitude of its impacts in the DEMATEL analysis. However, a serious problem is that improving information services did not affect beef cattle farming or prevailing conditions. It was established that the correlations or potential structures between pairs of elements could be confirmed more easily, in detail, by applying PCA to the total relation matrix.
