User:AuthorMikeLord/sandbox

Farmer Field Schools in Vietnam. Farmer Field Schools was a system designed to offer training to farmer families, who were often illiterate, so that they could upgrade their farm land and increase their productivity. That applied at the request of the farmer families to both crops, like paddy, and animal husbandry. The system probably originated fifty odd years ago, but in 1995 the term “Farmer Field Schools” was first used in an Asian Development Project in the North West Province in Sri Lanka. Technical training for most people had been offered as Technical College or University with the prospect of a career in Agriculture. This completely excluded farmer families living in remote villages, and thus the education system trained extension workers to offer technical training to farmer families working on their own patches of land. In 1997 a project funded by the UNDP at provincial level in Vietnam offered training for a group of farmers who wanted to farm fresh water fish in the own ponds. A very competent lecturer was detailed to start this process and a day for his first lecture was arranged. A large group of farmers from several villages was arranged and collected together, and also local extension workers from the agricultural department. Ten minutes into the lecture it was apparent that most of the audience was talking and muttering amongst themselves, and none of them making notes as had been expected. Then “the penny dropped”. Almost the entire audience was illiterate. One man had spent the first ten minutes just writing his own name of the top of his notepad, which was all he could write.