Video-mediated farmer-to-farmer learning for sustainable agriculture

egional and national levels. This again emphasizes the need to invest in organizational networking
on top of capacity building in quality content development and a simple web interface.
“Keep it simple, use links or streaming technology, have excellent search engine.”
Jan Kees Vis, Unilever
“To make it simple, effective and not overloaded with western induced value approaches
to teach the world.”
Hans Jöhr, Nestec
“For low rate of access to internet, we need to provide CDs and DVDs to countries with
this limitation.”
Esmail Karamidehkordi, Zanjan University, Iran
“The main problem is we cannot access YouTube and similar video sites from our
institute as it is banned. Hope your efforts towards creating the global web portal may
help the whole rice community.”
Manjunath Prasad, Indian Agricultural Research Institute, India
6.2 Proposed content of a web-based platform
Most people who responded to the on-line survey felt that the web-based platform should cater to
different types of content, with a prime focus on agricultural technologies, and post-harvest,
followed by methodological and organizational aspects (Table 9).
Table 9. Priority content for a new web-based platform for farmer
training videos (n=442)
Video for farmers Agro-Insight, October 2011 page 36
Yes
(%)
Agricultural technologies 94 2
Post-harvest and processing 87 5
Methods (FFS, PVS,…) 85 7
Organizational (credit, markets,…) 77 11
Opinion-sharing and advocacy 69 16
The survey sparked disagreement about opinion-sharing and advocacy in videos, with 16 percent of
the people explicitly saying no to it. As no one really considered the web-based platform to be
directly used by farmers, opinion sharing was at times interpreted as a type of a discussion forum
whereby users of the platform could exchange experiences on how they had used the videos.
Quite a few initiatives, D-groups and so on already exist to discuss opinions on agricultural
development. As an increasing number of organizations also host videos advocating their own work
No
(%)