Providing
needed and demand-based knowledge and skills to rural communities in farming
are essential to boosting our national efforts towards achieving food
self-sufficiency.
For many parts of the world, extension services do help provide positive behavioural changes among farmers, thus introducing them to best practices.
The dissemination of useful and practical information to farmers such as improved seeds, fertiliser, pesticides, implements and livestock are primary responsibilities of our extension workers.
However, the country is experiencing shortage of agriculture extension workers as the extension service and farmer ration is not encouraging at all.
We need to train more agriculture specialists with different specialisations, who will help our farmers boost production and productivity.
We, therefore, realise the need for the government through the Ministry of Agriculture to help improve our extension service in the country.
Farmers are willing and ever ready to learn and adopt new innovations, but they need the information at the right time from the right people.
As stated in this and other pages of this paper, agriculture development requires various steps, and any of the key necessities missing could result in not reaching the production targets and overall food sufficiency vision.
An extension service in agriculture is all about getting connected and familiar to farmers at the village level.
It is high time that both the government and the civil society organisations working in the field of agricultural development made extension schemes a top priority hence, as the benefits are huge to the farmers and the country as a whole.
