Micro-Irrigation Technology Adoption in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon: A Behavioural Model
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors did studies to overcome this challenge for high sensitivity to water stress, water shortages losses in terms of potato yield and quality of farmers living in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. The use of water-saving technologies such as micro-irrigation systems are highly important and the adoption of this technique remains quite low among potato farmers in the Bekaa region as claimed by authors. A unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) served as the conceptual framework for investigating these farmers’ behaviour in adopting a new micro irrigation system was used to evaluate the outcomes. The overall experiments details shared by authors are appreciated, the following few points may considered to improve the manuscript quality.
1. The authors describes that the UTAUT technology without reference study for the current scenario. It is suggested to recheck the analysis.
2. The graphics of all figures need to improve.
3. The background to select the hypothesis and with subdomains may reconsider for specific region.
4. A sample of questionaries’ may be provided as supplementary material
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper studies the behavior of farmers living in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon when adopting the new micro-irrigation system with the conceptual framework of the unified theory of technology acceptance and use (UTAUT) that incorporates the risk perception factors. The policy implications of the conclusions were also discussed. This manuscript is generally well written, but there are still some problems need to be improved and further discussed.
1. The content of this article is related to micro-irrigation technique, but there is no general description of this technology in the Introduction section. It is recommended to add these descriptions in this section.
2. In Behavioural models and research hypotheses, the composition of the traditional UTAUT was introduced in detail, but the previous researchers ' cases and results of applying this model were not introduced. Therefore, it is not possible for readers to understand this model. It is suggested to join this partï¼›
3. Line 253, should it be from March to April?
4. Some chapter numbers may not correct, please check.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear Authors,
I was curious about the research presented in the manuscript entitled: "Micro-irrigation Technology Adoption in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon: A Behavioral Model" by Maria Sabbagh and Luciano Gutierrez.
This manuscript presents the results of a study aimed at assessing the behavior of farmers growing potatoes when using a micro-irrigation system. The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) was used as the conceptual framework for the research.
The issue of introducing new resource-efficient technologies to agriculture, including micro-irrigation, is now a priority task in the light of the progressing climate change. Therefore, this research is of great cognitive and practical importance. The results presented in this manuscript provide visions of the policymaking process and provide insights that can advance research into the introduction of micro-irrigation into agriculture.
I believe that the research was conducted correctly and presented in an interesting way. I like Figures that clearly present the studied dependencies. The strength of the manuscript is the clear presentation of hypotheses and their validation based on the research results.
However, I have a few comments that Authors should consider and include in this manuscript:
1) First of all, the manuscript is very sloppy in conforming to the template requirements of the Sustainability journal.
2) Please pay special attention to the formatting of the Tables, as it is very different from the template, etc. Moreover, throughout the manuscript, the font type should be uniform and consistent with the template (eg Table 5, two types of font).
3) The literature is incorrectly cited in the text; publication numbers should be used instead of the names and the year of publication.
4) The keywords should not repeat the words appearing in the title of the manuscript, and should also be placed in alphabetical order.
5) References - this chapter is very sloppyly formatted. In addition, it contains a lot of old literature. I would propose to verify this list and remove some of the publications.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
