In several industries, including the agriculture industry, information and communication technology (ICT) expenditure has been gradually increasing. This study explores the ICT investment of Korean agricultural corporations, and examines the effect of ICT investment on their profitability using an IT portfolio framework. As the organizational capabilities and environment in which ICT is used is critical in examining its impact, the IT-savvy level is used as a moderator. An increase in ICT investment size results in a significantly positive effect on profitability in organizations with higher IT-savvy levels, whereas there is no effect in organizations with lower IT-savvy levels. This study shows the necessity of understanding the structure of ICT investments in the agriculture industry, and suggests the importance of organizational capabilities and environment in making best use of ICT.

The purpose of this study is to compare and analyze the product image produced by the cinemagraph image and the product image produced by the general image in the electronic trade. The cinemagraph refers to the image with a special characteristic that provides the motion clue by playing the part of the picture endlessly in the form of a video. For this study, we explored how the perceived monetary value, brand attitude, and perceived taste would influence on the purchase intention, and it was analyzed that all of the three factors significantly influenced on the purchase intention. However, it was investigated that the purchase intention of the group watching the image by the cinemagraph was significantlyinfluencedby the perceived monetary value and the perceived taste, and the purchase intention of the other group watching the general image was significantly influenced by the brand attitude and the perceived taste; therefore, it was verified that there was a difference between the group watching the cinemagraph and the group watching the general image. In this result, it could be interpreted that when the people watching the cinemagraph purchase a product in the shopping mall, the price becomes the important requirement, and when the people watching the general image purchase a product in the shopping mall, the brand becomes the important requirement; therefore, these results could provide great implications to the food marketers.

As the consumers’ anxiety for food increases, the interest in food safety also increases. To satisfy the public requirement on food safety, the government is trying to set up a food safety standard by using regulations and certification systems. However, there is still difficulty in building up complex traceability systems for medicinal crops including ginseng due to the low participation of farming industries. The purpose of this empirical research is to draw factors that impede the GAP adoption of ginseng farms. By comparing the average attitude and intention to adopt the ginseng farms’ depending on its characteristics through a two-tailed test, it was drawn that continuous farming education can positively influence the GAP adoption of the ginseng farms.

With the confirmation of the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and as cheap foreign agricultural products are beginning to be freely distributed in Korea, the government has taken a greater interest in securing the competitiveness of domestic agriculture. Accordingly, the Korean government has presented plans to advance the interests of ‘small but strong farmers’ and secure their competitiveness in line with the agricultural conditions in Korea. The government also announced that it will focus on leading these efforts in rural areas. The main thrust of this plan to support ‘small but strong farmers’ focuses onutilizing advanced peripheral technologies such as IT and BT; however, there are only a few Information Management Division centers currentlyoperating across the nation, and these are mainly in the IT-related divisions of the Agricultural Research and Extension Services and Agricultural Technology Centers. Therefore, in this study, we used the responses from a survey of farmers to identify regional differences in informatization levels and the digital divide among ‘small but strong farmers’ according to the presence or absence of an Information Management Division center. As a result, we found that the ‘small but strong farmers’ in regions with an active Information Management Division center received more IT services and had a higher level of informatization. Thus, to increase the use of IT-related peripheral technology by these ‘small but strong farmers’, it is important to maintain or increase the number of Information Management Division centers.