The document discusses the Farmer Field School (FFS) approach to educating farmers that was developed in Indonesia in the 1980s. It has since been used successfully in many countries to promote integrated pest management. The FFS approach involves groups of farmers meeting weekly over the course of a cropping season to learn experientially about crop management through hands-on study of an experimental plot. Studies show FFS trained farmers have increased yields by adopting practices like improved varieties and better water management while decreasing their use of pesticides, saving money. The government of Pakistan has launched projects using the FFS approach and hopes it will help address low yields and food security issues through farmer education.

1. Farmer Field School: An Effective Approach to Educate Farmers Agricultural Extension
And Rural Development
Lecture 12
Rural development is a global concern and Pakistan is not an exception. All countries have adopted
models for development to address the indigenous problems and build the capacity of rural communities.
Since independence, various models and programmes have been launched to strengthen the farming
community in Pakistan.
These models and programmes include Village-Agricultural-Industrial-Development (V-AID)
Programme, Basic Democracy System (BDS), Integrated Rural Development Programme (IRDP), Inputs
at farmers? doorstep approach, Training and Visit System (T&V) and modified T&V system, i.e. post-
devolution decentralised approach.
These programmes were launched and abolished one after the other in the succeeding decades of the
20th century. These programmes were intended to educate farmers, build rural infrastructure, adopt
modern agricultural technology and ultimately to increase the farm yield by minimising the gap between
potential and average yield of the indigenous varieties. All the social studies conducted to evaluate the
impact showed that these programmes met with partial success, as the per-acre yield of Pakistan is still
much lower as compared to the world average yield. Even, an imported model, i.e. the T&V System,
which was designed and funded by the World Bank, could not have significant impact on the yield gap
and the living standard of Pakistan?s farming community.
In the 1980s, when the T&V System was in full swing in Pakistan, a new approach or model to farmers
training emerged in Indonesia, called the Farmer Field School.? The Farmer Field School (FFS) is a
group based learning process that has been used by a number of governments, NGOs and international
agencies to educate farmers with special emphasis on Integrated Pest Management (IPM). The first FFSs
were designed and launched by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Indonesia in
1989. To date, more than two million farmers across Asia have participated in this type of learning.
Farmers learn about crop management by understanding the agro-ecology particularly the relationship
between insect-pest and beneficial insects. More interesting is the fact that FFSs are inclined toward
biological control and organic farming, with a clear objective to minimise the excessive use of pesticides
that are serious health hazards for human and animal. To understand the impact of FFS, it is imperative
to elaborate a typical farmer field school.
Farmer Field School is field based learning and lasts for a full cropping season. School does not mean
the primary or middle like school in our country, but it is a weekly meeting of farmers, that might range
from at least 10 up to 16 meetings depending upon the crop under experience. The primary learning
material at a FFS is the field of a crop. The field school meeting place is close to the learning field often
in a farmer,s home and sometimes beneath a convenient tree, with or without boundary walls.

2. Educational methods in FFS are experiential, participatory and learner centred.
The trainer in the FFS is called facilitator, who facilitates the learning process by giving useful
information and inputs to the farmers. In every FFS, farmers conduct a study to compare the treated and
non-treated plots. FFS often includes severaladditional field studies depending on local field problems.
A group of farmers,(between 25 and 30) participate in a FFS and participants learn together in small
groups of five.
The FFS curriculum is designed to help the farmers in developing skills to identify their localised issues,
formulate and test solutions, conduct analysis, and draw conclusions to test which solutions are the most
appropriate under their respective conditions. It can be safely stated that FFS build the capacity and
induce the power of decision making in farmers by mitigating the dependency on external sources of
expertise to solve the problems relating to the farming system. Farmer field schools have been
successfully conducted in many countries like Indonesia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Philippines, Sri
Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Peru and Bolivia, Burkina Faso and Kenya,etc to promote the integrated pest
management practices particularly among rice growers.
A general estimate shows that the cost of conducting a season-long field school for 25 farmers has
ranged from $150 to $1,000 depending on the country and the organisation. In some cases,the trained
farmers of FFS have saved $40 per hectare per season by eliminating pesticides without any loss of
yield. In other cases,trained farmers did not experience any savings because they were not previously
using any pesticides, but yields increased by as much as 25 percent as a result of adopting other practices
learnt during the FFS, such as improved varieties, better water management and enhanced plant
nutrition.
The policy makers of the last government were also convinced by the progressive results of the FFS
around the world and different projects were launched based on the FFS approach, in the various selected
districts of southern, northern and central Punjab in the last few years. The FFSs are conducted on fruits,
vegetables and cotton crops.
The FAO-EU IPM Programme for Cotton in Asia, worth US$ 12.4 million, promoted this approach to
pest-management between 1999 and 2004, in Bangladesh, China, India, Philippines, Vietnam and
Pakistan. Since 2004, the Pakistan government has committed US$ 7.7 million in public funds to
integrate the crop management efforts into public policy, university curricula, provincial extension
services and research and development. Projects at both the national and provincial level are well on
their way to using farmer field schools to train 167,000 farmers over five years.
The present government also seems ambitious regarding the FFS. In the existing department of
agricultural extension, farmer meetings are now being conducting on FFS pattern (agricultural hub) by
the combined efforts of field assistants and agricultural officer as per notification by the government of
the Punjab since last week. It could be a transitional phase in paradigm shift from traditional, top-down
to modern and participatory mode of technology dissemination in the department of agricultural

3. extension. Regarding the FFS, initially, national data shows dramatic decline in pesticide use in the
project areas. Judicious use of pesticides directs to the way of higher profit and better health of the
society.
It is important to put a question that whether this investment in the public sector and the running projects
would yield the desired results or these projects would be abolished like others in the past. It is the need
of the hour to ensure the efficiency of the investment by strict monitoring and evolution. It is important
to produce high quality commodities to meet the WTO standards and to ensure the high farm yield to
overcome the food security crisis through farmers? education in farmer field schools.