17 pages, The creation of commercialization opportunities for smallholder farmers has taken primacy on the development agenda of many developing countries. Invariably, most of the smallholders are less productive than commercial farmers and continue to lag in commercialization. Apart from the various multifaceted challenges which smallholder farmers face, limited access to extension services stands as the underlying constraint to their sustainability. Across Africa and Asia, public extension is envisioned as a fundamental part of the process of transforming smallholder farmers because it is their major source of agricultural information. Extension continues to be deployed using different approaches which are evolving. For many decades, various authors have reported the importance of the approaches that effectively revitalize extension systems and have attempted to fit them into various typologies. However, there is a widespread concern over the inefficiency of these extension approaches in driving the sustainability of smallholder farming agenda. Further, most of the approaches that attempted to revolutionize extension have been developed and brought into the field in rapid succession, but with little or no impact at the farmer level. This paper explores the theory and application of agricultural extension approaches and argues the potential of transforming them using digital technologies. The adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as mobile phones and the internet which are envisaged to revolutionize existing extension systems and contribute towards the sustainability of smallholder farming systems is recommended
Wilde, W. David (author / Swinburne University of Technology) and Swatman, Paul A. (author / Swinburne University of Technology)
Format:
Paper
Publication Date:
1997
Published:
Australia
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 147 Document Number: C23538
Notes:
19 p., The farming community, in many parts of Australia, is widely dispersed and heavily dependent upon communication both within the community and outside. In this preliminary paper, we explore the information needs and information flows of the rural sector and consider the farm as the potential focus of a virtual community. A virtual community may form a basis both for electronic commerce, in the traditional sense, and for rich telecommunications-mediated social activity. We describe factors apparently inhibiting the implementation of rural virtual communities in Australia and finally, we introduce a research project that will evaluate a model of inhibiting factors for the development of virtual communities within a real-world rural setting.
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 199 Document Number: D09926
Notes:
NCR-90 Collection, From Document D09924, "Department of agricultural journalism University of Wisconsin-Madison: Faculty and graduate student research, 1990". Page 5.
O'Keefe, Garrett (author), Anderson, Susan (author), Novak, Peter (author), Trumbo, Craig (author), Rursch, Julie (author), McCallister, Robert (author), and Jackson-Smith, Douglas (author)
Format:
Project report
Publication Date:
1994
Published:
USA
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 199 Document Number: D09866