Journal of Experimental Agriculture International

Organic farming requires knowledge that extends from production principles and organic inputs to ecological management, certification and marketing. This study developed and preliminarily validated a concise knowledge test for assessing organic-farming knowledge among farmers in Telangana, India. An initial pool of 40 multiple-choice items was prepared from relevant literature, technical materials and expert consultation and organised across four domains: organic inputs; principles and practices; ecological and environmental aspects; and certification and marketing. The preliminary items underwent expert face/content review and item analysis using difficulty index, discrimination index and point-biserial correlation. Seventeen items satisfying prespecified criteria were retained. The final instrument showed acceptable but modest internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.70). It was subsequently administered to 120 farmers, including 60 organic and 60 conventional farmers. The reported analysis shows an overall distribution of 16 farmers with low knowledge, 61 with medium knowledge and 43 with high knowledge; however, these counts conflict with the organic/conventional subgroup frequencies, which sum to 42, 51 and 27, respectively. Because respondent-level records were unavailable for verification, category prevalence is treated as provisional rather than reconciled by assumption. The analysis also reported a significant between-group difference in knowledge scores (t = 7.69, p < 0.01), while exploratory analyses indicated associations with several socioeconomic, institutional and behavioural characteristics. The instrument offers a compact basis for knowledge-gap assessment and training-needs diagnosis, but the present evidence should be regarded as preliminary because the category-count discrepancy, expert-panel details, quantitative content-validity indices, external validation and complete inferential model diagnostics remain unresolved. Further validation against the original data and across locations and certification contexts is warranted.