Participation of farmers in all steps of SRI trials and demonstrations help to re-shape the technology. Extension workers working together with farmers in diversified farming and agro-ecological conditions enhanced some of the SRI recommendations/practices according to soil type and other conditions, in particular varieties and farmers' socio-economic situation. These modifications proved to have good results and SRI has been disseminated to several districts of the country. These results emphasized that such partnership and modification can be helpful to increase technology acceptance, especially for those farmers who have poor resource and living far from modern agriculture development.
It was an afternoon of 2002 when I first read about SRI. As an extension officer in the District Agriculture Development Office (DADO), I started promoting SRI in the following years in the district of Morang, Nepal. Over this time I observed hundreds of attractive SRI fields and spent some years as a SRI activist. Looking at the results, I’ve learnt that different farmers face different problems, and that they adapt all techniques to suit their diverse circumstances and needs.
The U.S. Land-Grant Model and Other Examples
Summary of an International Seminar/Webinar
November 7, 2014
This year’s Centennial Anniversary Celebration of the U.S. Cooperative Extension System (CES) highlights the important outreach and service function that the CES continues to provide through the auspices of U.S. Land Grant Universities. With the growing interest in extension around the world – and in keeping with the Centennial Celebration - USDA/NIFA and GFRAS held a webinar to explore the future and potential role of a country’s higher education institution(s) in providing extension/advisory services. Presenters and participants in the webinar were asked to consider:
Graduate programs in agriculture in developing countries such as in Ethiopia are often designed in cognizance of the need for skilled manpower for gricultural development. In Ethiopia, the contribution of graduates of agricultural graduate programs to the ttempt to transform smallholder agriculture has become a matter of urgency in the face of the increasing challenge of food insecurity. However, the performance of graduates of those programs in making oncrete contributions to the urgent needs of agricultural development has been patchy at best. There ight be no single best solution as to how to make agricultural graduate programs and/or their raduates responsive to the needs of agricultural development. In particular, hopes that effective teaching nd learning in agricultural graduate programs would lead their students to attain the relevant knowledge and skills to make concrete contributions to agricultural development are frequently not realized. ...
Since the late 1980s, support to agriculture has moved from top-down agricultural extension towards more participatory approaches which better suit smallholders. One such approach is the farmer field school (FFS), an adult education intervention which uses intensive discovery-based learning to promote skills. Although an estimated 12 million farmers have been trained by FFS in over 90 countries across Asia, Africa and Latin America, the effectiveness of this approach has long been a subject of debate. Drawing on a systematic review of over 500 documents, this study finds that, although FFSs have changed practices and raised yields in pilot projects, they have not been effective when taken to scale.
The FFS approach requires a degree of facilitation and skilled facilitators, which are difficult to sustain beyond the life of the pilot programmes. FFS typically promotes better use of pesticides, which requires hands-on experience to encourage adoption. As a result, diffusion is unlikely and has rarely occurred in practice.
Teagasc Better Practice in Evaluation Services, Ireland
The proceedings of the 2012 conference
MEAS provides user-friendly materials for dissemination as well as training programs that promote new strategies and approaches to rural extension and advisory service delivery. The modules and their brief descriptions are being published upon approval as "in progress". Upon completion, the training material will be made accessible as well.