RE: Enhancing funding and service delivery in agriculture: any ideas? | Eval Forward

Please allow me to add to my original comment a concern about the quality of the government services even if well funded. I have a major concern with the extension education effort to promote many innovations for smallholder particularly if they are more labor intensive. The problem is that agronomist, including myself, do an excellent job of determining the physical potential of an innovation, but say nothing about the operational resources needed to extent the small plot result across the rest of the field, farm or smallholder community. It is just assumed the labor is available and has the dietary energy to handle the extra effort. Unfortunately, this assumption is not correct and labor and dietary energy to fuel that labor are in short supply so the farmers have little prospects to adopt the extension recommendations. The question I have is who within the government or development project is responsible to determine the labor requirements, more importantly the availability of labor, and the rational compromises farmers have to make when the labor is in short supply.

Meanwhile and largely independent of government effort, the farmers look for access to mechanization for land preparation and crop establishment as well as threshing and other high labor intensive activities.

Please consider the following webpages:

 https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/integration-an-under…;

https://webdoc.agsci.colostate.edu/smallholderagriculture/OperationalFe…;

https://smallholderagriculture.agsci.colostate.edu/calorie-energy-balan…;

Thank you