Effectiveness of Farmer Field School and Conventional Extension Trainings on Knowledge Gain among Farm Women

The world extension forum over three-four decades emphasized the people centric bottom up approach in extension work. In mid 1970s world bank had introduced Training and Visit (T&V) system of extension in 70 countries including India. This solely emphasized the dissemination of Green Revolution technologies to farmers, mainly in Asian and African countries with top down extension approach. Subsequently, FFS emerged in the rice paddy fields of the Philippines and Indonesia in the late 1980s where, Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) had heavily involved from its incubation, development and spread to Asian, African countries and other parts of world in 1990s with the emphasis on bottom up approach and participatory extension services. This demanded a paradigm shift in extension purview and its methodology to factor upon farming fraternity participation in all possible ways. Despite that the technology transfer process remains unchanged and unrefined till now. The best features of extension methodologies are identified by making literature review pertaining to Farmer Field School (FFS) and Training and Visit (T&V) method of extension trainings. Both Farmer Field School (FFS) and conventional extension training methodologies were used to train women groundnut growers in Pennagaram villages, Dharmapuri, India and the change in knowledge level and the effectiveness of methodologies were studied. In context, 29 important crop production practices in groundnut cultivation were identified and surveyed with 300 participants of which, 50% of participants ( n=150) exposed to FFS way of training and 50% of participants (n=150) exposed to T&V way of training. Most (90-95%) of the survey respondents found that the FFS way of training as better effective than T&V way of training. Similarly, the knowledge level of 80 to 85% of participants who participated FFS way of training found to be more than the participants who attended T&V way of training.