This paper suggests that agricultural education institutions need to foster their relationship to the development process through the integration of academic scholarship with development tasks, including national but especially local development tasks. The implication is that a wide range of stakeholders in local development should participate in the curriculum development process

This paper discusses various approaches to agricultural education. The "experiential learning" approach has recently been developed for teaching agriculture. Experiential learning is not only based on school knowledge and acquired skills, but also on experience; hence its name. It views learning and the farming environment as "soft systems", meaning systems that are not fixed.

There are very direct implications for agricultural education in the area of human resource capacity building since by definition the term (and the process) has education, both formal and non-formal, at its core. In its broadest interpretation, capacity building encompasses human resource development as an essential part of development.

Crop forecasting is the art of predicting crop yields (tons/ha) and production before the harvest actually takes place, typically a couple of months in advance. Several techniques can be used. What is described here is the approach used by FAO in national food security systems. Crop forecasting relies on computer programmes that describe the plant-environment interactions in quantitative terms. Such programmes are called "models", and they attempt to simulate plant-weather-soil interactions. They need, therefore, information and data on the most important factors that affect crop yields - the model inputs. After passing "through" the model, the inputs are converted to a number of outputs, such as maps of crop conditions and yields.