Agricutural extension Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Agricutural extension - Research Paper Example Agricultural extension refers to the acts of impacting critical agronomic techniques and skills to the rural farmers in a participatory manner, with a goal of improving the overall performance of farmers (White, 2012). The process of agricultural extension generally involves conveying of essential and practical information to the farmers. The data usually includes ways of using improved seeds, pesticides and fertilizer. Agricultural extension education started in the early 1800. Immediately after American Revolution, many agricultural societies began to operate. One of the main societies was formed by John Skinner, who encouraged American farmers to start reporting on their successes and methods they used to solve various problems they encountered in their daily farming activities. This served as a platform for many American farmers. They exchanged ideas on how to enhance their farming skills using the platform (White, 2012). In the early 1910, USA agricultural sector in collaboratio n with agricultural colleges started to provide agricultural extension services to the rural farmers. With the use of the free extension services, farmers were able to increase wheat production in the country by nearly 40 % (White, 2012). This helped America to contain the food shortage problem that came as a result of the world war one and two. During the famous severe depression, agricultural extension services, mainly concentrated on improving the farm management skills of individual farmers. They engaged in a programme of teaching farmers how to sell their products at favorable prices. They also offered women basic skills on how to ensure they obtain proper nutrition for each household (White, 2012). They offered free services to women on how to improve their home poultry production, house gardening and also carrying out food canning to avoid wastages Incase of surplus production. Traditional agricultural extension services concentrated more on improving production at the househ old level as opposed to the present extensions. The extension mainly dealt with production and marketing of agricultural products. With new rules and policy changes, extension education for the next twenty five years will be so much different with what was offered in the past. Instead of focusing on rural farmers only, the agricultural education extension will deal with more broad issues affecting peoples life’s both in urban and rural areas (Rice, 2012). With economic and environmental dynamics, the extension education will dwell on how to help individuals learn new methods of obtaining income through encouraging them to adopt auxiliary enterprises. The extension will focus on helping farmers to improve their marketing strategies, management skills and also efficiency (Rice, 2012). This will ensure that farmers are able to deliver effectively. The new extension services will also deal with training farmers on how to take care of health, safety and consumer issues of the agri cultural products. Customers are with age becoming more health alert. This calls for distribution of high quality and safe products. Farmers need to be taught how to produce safe agricultural products for their health safety and others. With this in mind, the new extension services will focus on teaching customers how to implement safe biofortification processes so as to ensure their products are safe for consumption (Rice, 2012). Critical issues Agricultural extension has continued to live in the process of change globally. With the support of international agencies, governments are struggling to avail both financial and structural reforms to ensure extension services are improved and accessible to the targeted farmers. With all this support from the government, the agricultural extension will be focusing on all the key issues affecting the daily health of the people of America and the nation future as a whole. It will intensively dwell on ways to; ensure healthy human population, public improvement and development of agricultural