Journey of "intellectualizing" farmers

To have a professional agriculture, there must be a team of professional farmers. To have a knowledge-based agriculture, farmers must be intellectualized. "Intellectualizing" farmers in agricultural extension activities is carried out through activities such as information and propaganda, training, and transfer of science and technology... to spread knowledge and skills to help farmers improve their qualifications, change their thinking and production practices, access and master science and technology to become professional farmers. After 30 years of construction and development, Thai Binh agricultural extension activities have made many important contributions to restructuring the agricultural sector associated with building new rural areas.

The success of demonstration models implemented by Thai Binh Agricultural Extension Center has contributed to helping farmers change their production mindset and form large fields.

Accompanying farmers

After 30 years of construction and development, the Thai Binh agricultural extension system has been continuously consolidated and operated effectively to meet the agricultural production requirements of the province. The team of agricultural extension officers from the province to the grassroots level is regularly trained to improve their qualifications in all aspects, capable of meeting the requirements of assigned tasks. Agricultural extension activities are diverse in all fields, reaching many regions and many subjects, creating great changes in productivity and quality, recognized and highly appreciated by localities and farmers in the province.

In the years 1993 - 2003, the urgent requirement in this period was production to ensure national food security, the team of agricultural extension officers strengthened the investigation, classification and successfully built agrochemical soil maps, agricultural land use maps for about 80% of localities in the province, from which the localities built a basis for production guidance plans. Technical measures on determining the structure of varieties, sowing season, sowing young seedlings, shallow planting, balanced fertilization... were extensively and comprehensively trained to farmers. In parallel, the Center researched, searched and imported thousands of new rice varieties for testing, built models, found a set of rice varieties suitable for the province's ecological conditions, with yields 2 - 3 times higher than old varieties, adding to the province's crop variety structure. During the period from 1993 to 2003, with the active contribution of the Agricultural Extension Center, it has contributed to promoting the remarkable development of agricultural production in the province, increasing rice productivity from 72.69 tons/ha/year (in 1991) to 126 tons/ha/year (in 2002), average food per capita from 398 kg (in 1991) to 604 kg (in 2002); meat output from 31.8 thousand tons (in 1991) to 60.6 thousand tons (in 2002).

From 2003 to 2013, agricultural extension work focused on the goal of transforming the structure of crop and livestock varieties. Through the implementation of testing and model building, new and effective crop and livestock varieties were recommended for expansion, typically: rice varieties BC15, D.uu 527, Lang Lieu sticky rice, sticky corn varieties MX4, MX10, melon varieties Kim Co Nuong, Bach Le... In particular, the BC15 rice variety selected by the staff of Thai Binh Agricultural Extension Center was filtered and propagated by ThaiBinh Seed Group. Currently, the BC15 variety is in the province's rice variety structure and has spread throughout the country. When applying the short-term rice variety set, the crop structure has changed, this is a clear breakthrough in intensive rice cultivation in Thai Binh and is one of the leading provinces with the late spring - early season crop. From there, the way was opened for the movement to develop winter crops in the province, models of crop rotation, intercropping, and crop increase were developed, many models achieving 4-5 crops were formed; models of converting spring rice and summer-autumn rice on ineffective rice-growing land to growing high - value vegetables were strongly promoted.

Since 2013, closely following the industry's orientation to develop ecological, efficient and sustainable agriculture towards increasing added value, competitiveness, linking product consumption, ensuring food safety, national food security, protecting the ecological environment, agricultural extension activities have focused on supporting farmers in commodity production, applying advanced intensive farming techniques and applying mechanization, 4.0 technology, digital transformation in production. Encouraging the development of green, organic and circular agriculture. Transforming from agricultural production thinking to agricultural economic thinking; organizing agricultural production according to the value chain, based on science - technology and digital transformation.

"Intellectualizing" farmers in the new era

Mr. Tran Minh Hung, Director of Thai Binh Agricultural Extension Center, said: Agriculture is becoming a modern business, instead of relying only on experience. Especially, in the context of epidemics, climate change, market fluctuations, and changes in consumer trends, agricultural producers must update new knowledge and new skills to enrich their intelligence, to think deeper, look further, and look broader. "Intellectualizing" farmers, improving their education level, professional qualifications, skills, vocational skills, production management, business, and agricultural product trade continues to be the top priority in agricultural extension activities.

“Intellectualizing” farmers is associated with the process of reorganizing production and developing farmer organizations; classifying farmer households to have solutions to support training, consulting, providing information services, and developing different agricultural sectors; building a number of “innovative” models in agriculture suitable for groups of farmer households; improving the capacity of state public service organizations and diversifying the forms of providing information to farmers.

Innovate the content and methods of agricultural extension activities in accordance with the level of production development, apply the method of "group agricultural extension" so that farmers can influence each other, agricultural extension officers only guide and promote. Shift from "hand-holding" agricultural extension to consulting and suggesting. On the basis of applying advances in information technology to build and supplement more information channels for agricultural extension propaganda on smartphones and the internet such as SMS messages, Facebook social networks, Zalo groups, agricultural industry websites, digital transformation, the province's agricultural database software... to provide farmers with documents, technical manuals, and technical instruction clips in a convenient and quick manner, reducing printing costs. At the same time, it also creates conditions for two-way information, helping people reflect necessary issues and shortcomings in the production process to functional units and authorities at all levels.

The 30-year journey of construction and development is enough to affirm the role and mission of agricultural extension work for the development of Thai Binh agriculture. In the following years, the agricultural extension system will continue to promote good achievements and experiences, constantly innovate content and methods to improve the quality and efficiency of agricultural extension activities to meet the increasingly high requirements of production practices and expectations of farmers, worthy of the expectations of the head of the agricultural sector: "Where there are farmers - there is agricultural extension".

Ngan Huyen

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