An Analysis of Facilitative Factors in Farmer Field School (FFS) and Conventional Extension Method of Trainings among Women Groundnut Producers

There has been a paradigm shift in extension purview all over the world to factor upon participation of farming fraternity in all possible ways of extension services. In spite of several efforts over three-four decades the technology transfer process and methodology still remains the same and unchanged. While the world bank introduced (in 1970s) Training and Visit (T&V) system of top down extension approach focusing on dissemination of Green Revolution technologies, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) introduced Farmer Field School (FFS) (in 1980s) that emphasized mainly the bottom up-participatory-facilitative approaches in technology transfer process. The objective of this paper is to study the facilitative factors followed in both conventional and FFS way of training, this was assessed through 10 training topics covered in both the method of trainings. Three hundred (300) farm women who had involved in groundnut cultivation in Pennagaram villages, Dharmapuri, India who got trained under FFS and T&V ways separately were surveyed for this study. From 90 to 95% of the survey respondents indicated that they found the facilitative factors followed in FFS way of training was better effective than T&V way of conventional extension training. The mean scores of FFS ranged from 0.82 to 0.94 and significantly differed with the T&V way of conventional extension training score ranged from 0.03 to 0.16.