[SOUND] I'm Paul McNamara. I'm an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics. And I work around the world with a whole team of university based and NGO based experts on strengthening agricultural extension systems. So today I'm going to talk about Ag extension for the prevention of post-harvest losses. Why is this an important topic? First off, if we want to reduce post-harvest losses for smallholder farmers in places like sub-Saharan Africa and in India, and in parts of South Asia, we need to recognise that extension is part of a solution that includes research, development, extension, training, all to reach smallholder farmers, and other actors along value chains. Secondly, it's a part of motivation for these remarks. We need to recognize that in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia more than 60% of the observed post-harvest losses are believed to occur at the level of the farm or in post-harvest handling or storage levels. That's according to the foodandagpolicy.org website. So on-farm loses and loses at the post-harvest level for smallholder farmers are critical and extension is one of the ways to help us reduce those. So in this talk I'm going to address a number of different questions. I'm going to talk about what's extension. Why is it important for farmers. I'm going to talk about what extension capacity or services exist for reducing post-harvest losses in agriculture. I'm going to talk about how effective extension services can contribute to reducing post-harvest losses. And how can we strengthen extension services and improve services to reduce these losses. I'm talking about post-harvest losses, especially in the context of smallholder farmers in places like sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, part of Latin America. So that's what's these remarks are intended to address. First off let's think about what is extension? I use a broad definition of extension. Here is a definition I like. It comes from Ian Christoplos in an FAO publication from 2010. He wrote, extension is defined broadly to include all systems that facilitate access of farmers, their organizations and other market actors to knowledge, information and technologies. It also includes facilitating their interaction with partners in research, education, agri-business and other relevant institutions. And it assists them to develop their own technical, organizational management skills and practices. Let's look at this definition through the lens of post-harvest losses, and think about some ways that extension could help reduce losses. First, through the facilitation angle. Extension can help farmers link to technologies, and information, ideas, knowledge and practices, that they weren't aware of before. Help them link to those and reduce their post-harvest losses. Here's an example: it could help farmers that weren't aware of a storage technology like bags to put their rice in and take the air out and store that rice very carefully. Farmers, a lot of farmers, wouldn't be aware of that kind of technology. Extension can help introduce it, train it and link farmers to supplies of those types of bags. You can think about lot of other technologies like that that extension can help link farmer too. So, that’s the facilitation angle. Another is to help farmers facilitate their interaction with partners within what we call an agricultural innovation system. So that's the research actors. Could be university, could be national research centers, or international centers, educational institutions like colleges and universities. Agricultural business is all along value chains, from suppliers of inputs to financiers and egg banks, to output markets and other actors along those chains. So it can help farmers connect with those. It could help link them with input suppliers or output markets. Better linkages with output markets could help farmers move their product more quickly off the farm into advanced systems to handle that product and move it into international markets that can help reduce losses. And lastly, extension can help farmers develop their own capacities. If farmers have better decision making abilities they can evaluate technologies out there and make their own mind up whether they want to spend their money to buy new harvesting equipment that might be more efficient but is costly, or a new storage technology, such as on-farm storage bins. They can make their minds up about that. But farmers need to be trained in many cases, about how to evaluate different investment decisions or technologies. And so that's the last part of extension. So understanding extension, what it does, is the first part. How can extension target the post-harvest stages of production. Extension can do a number of different things. It can provide technical assistance and training at the production level in the fields on techniques that by themselves actually help reduce the losses at harvest and post-harvest. There are certain agricultural things in terms of seed selection, variety of selection,planning techniques that can actually help reduce losses. Extension can facilitate tests and demonstrations of new equipment. It can facilitate demonstrations of new storage approaches. And new processing approaches in the community. It can provide marketing education that helps farmers move grain more quickly in the market channels, and move that grain at a higher quality. And it can build farmer organization capacity so that farmers can store, process, and market as a group, and realize greater returns for their production. What can we do to strengthen extension's role and help extension reduce post-harvest losses? Here's a number of things. First off, at a higher level, we can help extension get sustainable funding sources and high level political support. Secondly, when we look at the post-harvest loss question, we need to look at it as a system. Look all along a value chain, and understand that system. And think about it from the decision maker's point of view. And realize that there are multiple decision makers involved, from farmers, lots of farmers, to millers, and processors, and buyers in the marketing segment. And then, through logistics and distribution all the way down to consumers and consumer marketing end of the chain. All along there are decision makers. An extension has to think about developing programs. That can reach different decision makers, whether it's farmers or millers and processors or people further up the value chain. Understanding that it's a system is an important part of designing and effective extension program for post-harvest loss reduction. Another important thing is to see the extension work as a process. And see it as an iterative loop that starts with understanding the audience that the program is trying to reach and their needs, their understanding of the problem, coming up with solutions that actually work for the audience might field test those, and then defining key messages. Key messages that you know the audience can understand, and can make decisions and change behavior on the bases of those messages. Then you form the message and deliver it, that's what the program does. But you realize that a lot of work has gone ahead of the program to design it and understand the problem. So then your at message form and deliver it. And lastly we evaluate the entire program. Did the program reach the intended results in terms of changing farmer behavior? Suppose the goal of the program is to help farmers understand and make decisions about on farm storage technologies. Did it actually achieve that result? And we evaluate and then we go back and shape it, reshape it and do it again and fine tune it. Other things extension can do to reduce post-harvest loss are lots of demonstrations and make sure they are widely available through things like farmer field days or fairs. But also developing things like radio spots, little video vignettes, using them on television, distributing videos with the results of the demonstrations or farmer tests in them. And also remembering to do these things, the extension work, with input from farmers, with farmers having feedback and guidance into the process. And that making sure that the quality of the extension programming is high and if there is indications that the quality isn't sufficient that there are steps taken by program management to strengthen it. Lastly, in extension programs having the trust of farmers is extremely important and having information that's credible and backed by research and evidence is really important to establishing the trust with farmers. So always working to make sure that we're doing tests, that we're honestly evaluating the results of the test, learning from them, communicating straightforwardly with the audience for our programs is really important for building that trust. To sum up, here are some conclusions about how extension can contribute to reducing post-harvest losses for the case of smallholder farmers in places like sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. First, well-functioning extension services can help farmers adopt practices and technologies that can reduce post-harvest losses. Here are some ways extension can help smallholder farmers, from my own experience working internationally. Here's an example I saw about a month ago in southern Tajikistan, right along the Afghan border. We worked there with hundreds of women farmers in a pilot program that demonstrates appropriate extension techniques in that social setting. These women had never been targeted with extension services before and they are poor and they haven't received any agricultural training. We have a program that organized the women into groups, that they control, and they lead, and they design their own extension program. Some of the things they chose to focus on were improved techniques for managing their soil fertility. So things like composting, we train them in that. And different ways of testing whether the seeds they buy in the market are good quality seeds,so things like that. But they were also interested in things like we get all this produce from our backyard farms and gardens. And how can we store it longer at home, and so one thing we helped them learn about was just canning and storage. And so when I visited the project site about a month ago, one of the things one of the groups wanted to show me was the results of their storage training. And show me the cans of vegetables that they store for the winter months when they don't have access to fresh vegetables in the market. This is one example. There are a lot of other examples of how extension programs, when they work well, can help farmers increase their productivity and increases in productivity we know, means increased incomes. So effective extension programs are actually a poverty reduction program.
