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A video for incoming Peace Corps Volunteers or other extension agents working in rural agricultural development. Explains a bit of the background of Farmer Field Schools and some of the work of an agricultural volunteer in Mali, West Africa. If you are curious about what Peace Corps Volunteers who know [...]

Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is an important aspect to undertake in a project or programme and supports the management work to ensure compliance of its strategies, objectives and approach. It is the mechanism for which the process aspects of a programme can be tracked and accounted for, as well as [...]

Much of rural India is suffering from what Prime minister Manmohan Singh has termed “technological fatigue in agriculture” (Kshirsagar A, 2008). In order to reverse this state of affairs, considerable investment and macro scale action is required. However, for sustainable and meaningful change, community level extension is vital. One response [...]

Need for Pesticide Risk Assessment and Risk Assessment in IPM Programmes

There is an increasing demand on IPM projects to examine their economic, environmental, health and social impacts, including their achievements in reducing pesticide related risks. The Environmental Impact Quotient (EIQ) is one of the tools that is being used to measure achievements in pesticide risk reduction. It was developed in [...]

The need to increase agricultural sustainability has induced the government of India to promote the adoption of integrated pest management (IPM). An evaluation of cotton-based conventional and IPM farming systems was conducted in India (2002–2004). The farmers managing the IPM farms had participated in discovery-based ecological training, namely Farmer Field [...]

Public policy in developing countries has failed to invest in educating farmers on how to deal with variable agro-ecosystems and a changing world. Here we present an assessment of a participatory training approach in changing crop protection by farmers from chemically dependent, to more sustainable practices in line with the [...]

This document is a book of recompiled analysis that rely in the same data collected over a period of over four years in five pilot projects on the rise FFS in Thailand. It presents a blend of analytical procedures covering various aspects of impact.

This article focuses on the context of the Millenium development goals (MDG) and improving and maintaining soil fertility in Africa.