Modernization And Adoption of New Practices in Farming: An Agri-Extension Programme

Tight public budgets, reform initiatives like decentralization, and new ICT technologies have resulted in pluralistic extension and advisory services that combine public and private methods for funding and carrying out extension activities in many nations, particularly in the developing world (Davis and Franzel 2018). This pluralism reduces the financial burden on the public sector, promotes demand-driven services, and allows for flexibility. To guarantee that the needs of all farmers, not just big commercial farmers, are satisfied, it also makes coordination more difficult. It makes it difficult to guarantee that extension providers are held responsible, that economies of scale are realized, and that the public sector extension service is neither starved of funding nor discontinued. Eliminating public extension could result in unfulfilled demands for environmental improvement or for farmers with limited resources. The various extension service providers, including public extension, have different roles. It is necessary to decentralize program planning and management with strong client involvement that connects public extension to new information sources, keeping the system just political enough to secure resources but not so political as to be taken over by those in positions of power. When farmers see overly politicized systems as the government's eyes and ears rather than information providers, they lose credibility and ultimately lose funding. Public extension agencies in Ecuador and Honduras were disbanded a few years ago due to their politicization. Due in part to the cost of T&V, India, which has the second-largest extension system in the world, transitioned from a centralized T&V system in the 1970s and 1990s to a decentralized model more recently under the direction of the Agricultural Technology Management Agency (ATMA). With connections to research through the I, ATMA is an autonomous multistakeholder organization that includes farmer associations, NGOs, private organizations, and public extension agents. If female access to ICT is not less than that of men, ICT-based extension information could lessen gender bias by giving information to women-headed households with limited resources in their homes (World Bank 2017, p. 71). If given the opportunity, women are frequently just as eager as men to engage in online or offline social networks. Virtual networks and farmer groups are becoming more and more significant in the spread of technology. These networks must be utilized by extension services (World Bank 2017). For instance, even in developing nations, products like WhatsApp and other mobile networking and messaging apps are becoming widespread, and their use in extension is expanding quickly for subjects like crop pest diagnosis and recommendations (Davis and Franzel 2018; Beriya and Saroja 2019). As farmers' access to computers increases in developing nations, webinars and other distance learning tools can be used to impart in-depth decision-making skills. Effective in-service training is essential.

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