Abstract

The current qualitative research was done with the aim of analyzing the challenges facing the potato value chain based on the farmers’ opinions and providing solutions to improve it by emphasizing the provision of market- oriented extension services. The participants of this study were potato growers in Hamedan province who were purposefully selected using the snowball sampling technique. The content validity of this research was determined by a team experts. After conducting more than 10 hours of in-depth interviews with 14 potato growers, theoretical saturation was obtained. Reliability is very important in the content analysis method. Therefore, after the initial classification and evaluation of the concepts, the content was re-coded, classified, and evaluated, and if there is a high match, the results of the analysis of two coders were re-evaluated and accepted. Qualitative data analysis from semi-structured interviews in Nvivo10 software led to the extraction of 75 concepts in open coding and 8 core categories which were represented using two support activities and the main Porter value chain. Accordingly, most of the barriers raised by the respondents were financial-based concepts from the group of support activities and the lowest frequency in terms of source and number of references was related to outbound logistics and service operations from the main activities.