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Self-help journalism
Shree Padre, Center for Alternative Agricultural Media
Mr. Shree Padre, a farmer and journalist, narrates a unique success story of self-help journalism among farmers.
Those who grow never write; those who write don’t grow. This, in a nutshell, is the root problem of our farm journalism. We have good number of farm magazines, supplied at highly subsidized rates through subscription. Their aim: betterment of farming community. In numbers, they look impressive. But what about quality and purpose?
Before going into the details of an unique, successful experiment of self-help journalism, that is, farmers penning for their fellowmen, it is essential to examine the deficiencies and drawbacks of the present kind of farm journalism.
Farm journalism is being fed mainly through two ways. One: through the magazines. Nine out of ten such magazines are either published by our agriculture universities or by the agriculture research institutes run by Indian Council of Agriculture Research. Two: through farm pages of mainstream dailies and periodicals. One thing common in both are the writers. Either they are scientists or professors of these institutions or so called agricultural experts. In one way or other all these writers are government controlled.
Before going into the details of a successful experiment called self-help journalism, that is, farmers’ writing for their fellowmen, it is essential to examine the deficiencies and drawbacks of the present kind of farm journalism.
These gentlemen write what they believe is useful for the farming community. But, in reality, for the target groups, it’s nothing more than an academic output, which remains far off from their information needs.
(no date, but at least several years old)
Towards More Fruitful Agricultural Experimentation (PDF)
Mark MacLachlan, Echo Development Notes
For many of us the idea of “research” is scary. We are not trained in it. We picture rigorous statistical analyses that we do not have any idea about. We have seen glossy scientific journals with technical words that we could not understand. Besides, isn’t our goal to directly help small farmers? Why should we now do research? Who has time anyway?
Chances are that most of us are already involved in doing experiments at some level, but we just don’t call it “research.” We wish we had more information about some crop or agricultural technique, so we do a small variety trial or set up a demonstration to see if the idea works in our climate. How will this information be generated and distributed, if not by those of us in the field? And how will we know that we can safely implement or recommend some new method or plant unless we have done adequate experimentation?
Each of us has limited time and resources. But with a little thought, most of us can make the trials that we already do more useful. Anyone who has ever placed a seed into the soil and watched it grow can participate at some level in experimentation that is useful to all of us.
Imagine a missionary or extension agent who thinks that a certain plant might be useful in his area. He plants a small plot, though he does not record how much seed was used, the date it was planted, what the site conditions were or what method was used to plant it. After some time he finds that the plants did grow, and he ate the harvest He can only guess how much was produced. All he learned was that the crop seemed to do well and that he liked the food it produced.
Is that kind of experimentation useful? Yes. He learned what he wanted to know. Gardeners around the world do this kind of trial all the time and accept the results of their trials as valid.
But the usefulness of his trial could easily have been increased. Chances are he will not keep the information to himself. At the very least, he will show it to the people around him, farmers and development workers alike. He may even send an email to ECHO, where the information will be tucked away in a plant file, to be discovered at a later date by an intern preparing a research note. And that very anecdotal information will have enriched in a small way the knowledge base of the ECHO network.
There is a temptation to avoid doing experiments because we are not trained to do research or we lack resources. But instead of giving up completely, we should do experimentation using the resources we do have. We may not have the skills to do statistics, but we can take an average of a group of numbers. In planning any experiment, we should consider the target group. If our target group is university professors, we had better toe the line with our statistics. If our target group is uneducated farmers, we had better figure out what criteria they will accept to validate our trials, for the statistics are probably useless! I call this Resource Appropriate Experimentation. There are many simple ways to make agricultural trials more useful. The first step is to gather information.
Also in the same PDF:
Formalizing Your Research:How to Carry Out an Agricultural Experiment
by Edward Berkelaar, Ph.D.
As you work in agricultural development, there may be times that you find yourself wondering about the answer to a specific question you have. For example, should plants be spaced 30 cm or 60 cm apart to achieve the highest yield? Which one of three tomato cultivars would grow best in a particular area? Would growing a cover crop in the off-season result in higher corn yields? Once you decide on a particular question that you want answered, several steps can (and should) be taken. These steps will make the best use of your time and efforts while giving you the most confidence in your outcome. This article will cover the important steps in planning and carrying out an experiment and then apply these steps to a sample experiment. In some cases we have used big words, but please do not let them turn you off. We have tried to define the words well, and we have highlighted them to make them more obvious.
ECHO is a Christian non-profit organization whose vision is to bring glory to God and a blessing to mankind by using science and technology to help the poor.
(October 2003)
Also at ECHO:
Using Science to Help the Poor: Low-Budget Research Ideas (PDF)
Statistical Analysis of Simple Agricultural Experiments (PDF)
A New Kind of Big Science
Aaron E. Hirsh, The Wild Side (blog), New York Times
… Across many different fields, new data are generated by a smaller and smaller number of bigger and bigger projects. And with this process of centralization come changes in what scientists measure — and even in what scientists are.
In physics, a slow drift toward centralization was given a sudden shove during the Second World War — think Manhattan Project — so it is perhaps not surprising that colliders today epitomize what historians have called “Big Science.” But a similar evolution is now evident in virtually every discipline.
… A young discipline is bound to move first through the data it can gather most easily. And as it does, it also defines more exactly what it must measure to test its theories. As the low-hanging fruit vanish, and the most precious of fruits are spotted high above, bigger investments in harvesting equipment become necessary. Centralization is a way to extend scientists’ reach.
But of course, there are also some drawbacks. There’s something disturbingly hierarchical about the new architecture of the scientific community: what was before something like a network of small villages is today more like an urban high-rise, with big offices at the top and a lot of cubicles down below.
The trouble with this is not just what it means for the folks in the cubicles, but also that the entire business should rely so heavily on the creativity and vision of relatively few managers.
… There is another way to extend our scientific reach, and I believe it can also restore some of what is lost in the process of centralization. It has been called Citizen Science, and it involves the enlistment of large numbers of relatively untrained individuals in the collection of scientific data. To return to our architectural metaphor, if Big Science builds the high-rise yet higher, Citizen Science extends outward the community of villages.
… In the end, though, what may be most important about Citizen Science is what it could mean for the relationship between citizens and science. When everyone is gathering data, that rather austere and forbidding tower becomes a shared human pursuit. In 1963, Alvin Weinberg, who was then the director of Oak Ridge, likened Big Science to the greatest monuments civilizations have ever built: the cathedrals of medieval Europe; the pyramids of Egypt.
But just as we build higher our temples of scientific investigation, so too should we strengthen their foundations, and broaden their congregations.
Aaron is a biologist and writer based in Colorado. He has a doctorate in Biological Sciences from Stanford University, where he studied aspects of how molecules such as proteins evolve. He has, for several years led a summer field course in Baja California, Mexico, looking at the animals that live in the Sea of Cortez — otherwise known as the Gulf of California. A book about his adventures there, called “Telling Our Way to the Sea,” will be published next year. He is also a research associate at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
(13 January 2009)
Farmer Experimenters: Self-developed Technology (PDF)
Roland Bunch and Mateo Canas,, World Bank
In Honduras, as the result of the work of some 20 agricultural development agencies up through the early 1990s, hundreds of farmer experimenters (FEs) have been experimenting totally on their own for anywhere from two to ten years after the closing of the programs in which they were previously involved. In 1999, the Association of Advisors for a Sustainable, Ecological and People-Centered Agriculture (COSECHA) in Honduras decided to find out what technologies these FEs had been developing on their own, and how these technologies could best be disseminated to other farmers. To that end, COSECHA has systematically interviewed 50 of these FEs. The technologies counted were only those that small farmers had developed on their own, after program termination, and that had not been promoted or known within the country prior to the FE’s discovery of the technology.
The study shows that FEs are capable of developing large numbers of very significant and original technologies, providing evidence that the collecting and dissemination of FE technologies in other nations around the world could be a very useful activity for institutions involved in agricultural development
(October 2002)
Roland Bunch is author of the classic Two Ears of Corn (book review). Roland Bunch maintains a website -BA
