A Guide to Conservation Agriculture in Zimbabwe - Canadian ...

Promoting Conservation Agriculture Among Farmers
section TWO
If you are an NGO field officer:
• Work with and through AGRITEX – do not create a parallel extension service.
• Facilitate training AGRITEX staff in conservation agriculture including some simple paired plot demonstrations
that they can own and manage.
• Keep the program small, simple and manageable with a number of paired plot demonstrations to act as
focal points for training activities and group discussions.
• Involve the local leadership – traditional, church or political - as appropriate. They are useful for mobilizing
communities.
• Empower the farmers with respect to the technology and their organisation. In addition to training farmers
You may have your suggestions on how conservation
agriculture implementation can be made more
sustainable. And the farmers may have their own ideas
too; talk to them and get their views.
2.4 Principles and methods for training
and extension
Teaching adult learners
Traditional extension strategies tended to use a teacherpupil
model for interacting with farmers where the farmers
were passive recipients of research developed by external
researchers. Over the past three decades the weaknesses
of this approach have been revealed in the non-adoption
or lack of sustained adoption of new agricultural
technologies. This has led to the development of twoway,
more inclusive extension methods that view the
farmer as experimenter and practitioner and the extension
worker as a facilitator of change, and which recognise the
importance of indigenous or local knowledge and
practices (even where, as with planting basins, this has
been lost to the current generation of farmers).
Part of this re-evaluation of extension has arisen out of a
deeper understanding of how adults learn. Unlike children,
adult learners possess both the formal knowledge they
may have acquired at school as well as years of on the job
experience. Adult learners learn best when they can relate
new ideas to their existing body of knowledge and
practice. Theory should be presented, if at all, in the context
of what is happening or what is possible on the ground,
in other words, in a practical, relevant manner. Adult
learners learn best in a supportive environment where
they are accepted without judgement or criticism. Ideally
they should be involved in planning their own learning
experience. Adults learn best when they not only hear
information, but see, reflect on, question, try out and
finally put into practice their learning.
Participatory approaches
Generally speaking participatory methods are
recommended for training farmers in conservation
agriculture. Some extension officers in Zimbabwe will
already be familiar with participatory approaches to
research and problem identification (e.g. Participatory
Farming for the Future
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