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| The digital Green project is developing a participatory framework for agricultural extension | |||||||||
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Overview: Farmers India is primarily an agricultural country. Over 60% of the population relies on agriculture for its livelihood. Though a generational vocation, farming has been unable to maintain its traditional heritage because of social, economic, and environmental change.
The livelihoods of small and marginal farmers are in jeopardy in fragmented agricultural systems such as the one in India. Increasing debt and declining returns have led many to make desperate choices, which include selling their land below market rates and sometimes even taking their own lives. Farmers perceive that their options are limited because agricultural knowledge is often protected by the interests of chemical and seed manufacturers and market access is restricted by middle-men. Government extension officers are usually unable to visit with farmers for various reasons and agricultural broadcast programs lack relevancy. Farmers tend to find refuge in their own intuition and the hearsay of fellow villagers, which sometimes results in a downward spiral of poor decision-making. NGOs have attempted to fill this information gap with extension staffs that train farmers and visit fields to promote better practices. A farmer’s “conventional” operations may be transformed to reflect the following characteristics of sustainable agriculture:
India has the second largest number of extension workers in the world – 100,000. Consider the efforts of the GREEN Foundation, a grassroots-level NGO that has been promoting sustainable agricultural practices to farmers for the last 12 years. GREEN Foundation has concentrated its extension activities in 20 villages of southeastern Karnataka, India, and it now seeks to extend its reach to over 100. Like any organization, human and financial constraints pose significant challenges to scale and sustainability. A typical day of an extension worker begins by commuting one-hour over 5 km of poor roads and rough terrain to help a farmer on his field. At least 20-percent of the time, the farmer who requested the visit is not on his field. The worker then may choose to wait for the farmer or set out to find an alternate farmer. If the worker finds an interested farmer, one half-hour is often spent on introductions, two-hours on supervising the farmer take a particular action, and one half-hour on goodbyes. Half of the extension worker’s day is sunk in an uncertain visit to hand-hold a single farmer.
In general, extension workers concentrate their activities on a few farmers. As also found in the World Bank’s Training and Visit extension system, in each village, the workers restrict their work to the 2 or 3 farmers that are initially the most willing to work with them. Though extension systems may aim to use these farmers as models for others in the community, field staff is rarely able to show the progression of these farmers to wider audiences because of social and resource constraints.
The geographic dispersion and cultural diversity of a vast rural population of farmers pose seemingly insurmountable obstacles to the task of extension. Still, NGOs have built grassroots-level teams, which trek long distances to visit farmers, one by one, one plot at a time, to promote better practices. The DG system aims to improve the efficiency of the field staff by reducing these journeys to only those that are required and enabling each staff member to reach a wider audience of farmers. | |||||||||
