Introduction

In Thailand, we are working with the Agriculture ministry, health promotion office and small groups of private sector in doing something really simple and useful. We make sure, once the rural farmer families are being trained into sustainable micro-organic farming, the community coordinator will go to the farmland of all the trainees in order to take picture and videos using digital camera to capture what the trainees had done in improving their farmland using the trained method. So that, by the next time they meet for more training, they will discuss their implementing experiences with real pictures and clips which allow their peers to help think through various scenarios in applying the method to the farmland and help each other to become successful. Without this, many times the trained farmers simply go back after the training without really doing anything to their farmland although they might claim they did at the training sessions. Of course, they might not be lazy or anything but rather don't know how to start or didn't apply the method successfully. By going through each trainee's pictures and clips in the training process, the information about the status of the real world application of the method is very clear and distributed through out the group. This simple thing actually improve the effectiveness of the agricultural training programmes heavily. ---- Sunit