Working with Farmers: The Key to Adoption of Improved Fodder Technologies

The lack of a close working relationship between agricultural research organizations, different extension organizations and with different categories of farmers is one of the most difficult institutional problems of agricultural technological implementation in India. Agricultural research and extension organizations generally fight over the same limited government resources and they try to increase the flow of resources coming to their respective institutions to solve day-today management problems, rather than ensuring that their respective organizations contribute to the broader goal of getting improved agricultural technology to all major categories of farmers. In addition, the researchers and extension workers of many research and extension organizations overlook the important roles that farmers can play, in implementing and disseminating technology and, through effective feedback mechanisms, in helping set priorities and improving programme relevance (Parwada et al., 2010). Agricultural production technologies especially improved fodder technologies which may be production, utilization and conservation are developed by researchers for fulfilling their objectives with their available resources and conditions (Sethi and Sharma, 2011). The choices of farmers are ignored and ultimately these developed technologies are not fitted to different categories of farmers who live in community basis with poor resources (Mwamuye et al., 2013). The objective of this abstract is to outline an approach for identifying researchextension-farmer linkage problems, and then to describe different mechanisms that might be used to solve these problems. The basic assumptions that underlie are agricultural technology is a complex blend of materials, processes, and knowledge, difficulty in transfer of different types of technologies to technology users and, most small-scale farmers operate relatively complex farming systems (Quddus, 2012). The identification of different technology adoption rate linked with farming communities will help in formulating of new technologies for better adoption