Agricultural Technologies
Agricultural technologies, and/or indeed, any technology for that matter, once it has left the workshop or laboratory, leaves to meet two consumer tiers:
Credit: www.walkermorris.co.uk
a) The student who studies its underlying principles using pen and book tools, and ultimately ends up as the expert charged with acclimatizing the technology to local conditions,
b) And the lay farmer, tiller of soil, who is the target consumer and implementer of the technology, its principles and practices, using hoes and garden tools!
The first is almost always as a matter of rule, achieved as students toil away in thousands of academic institutions world-wide. So it is the least of our concerns, insofar as farmer talk is concerned.
But the second is. And it begs the question; why are thousands of classic agricultural technologies less utilized, despite their obvious capacity to fuel agricultural production?
Has it to do with investment and running costs? Has it to do with lack of access to technology? Apparently so, at least these are the two popular excuses you will hear in academic circles. But that is just about it: excuses, not an explanations.
a) Investment and running costs
The talk of investment and running costs is in large an excuse because whereas that might be seen to make sense in agrarian economies, it does not explain why the problem, namely, of farmer lethargy towards technology, exists even in advanced agricultural economies where farmers could easily afford.
And at any rate, it seems pretty obvious, is it not, that in any enterprise, agriculture not least, anything involving cost is weighted against returns.
Does technology result in, or cause a favorable balance sheet? Pretty obviously, under ideal conditions, no technology is released for consumption without the guarantee, both by design premise as well as by pilot test evidence, of improving any given agricultural enterprise, and in multiple ways, including increasing crop yield, buffering the crop against risk and hazard, reducing labor expenditure, saving production time etcetera.
That being true, makes the excuse cum explanation of investment and running costs only just an excuse, and a wrong one at that.
b) Lack of access
The absurdity of this excuse cum explanation of why classic agricultural technologies remain unconsumed, just like that of investment and running cost, obvious.
The popular mistake that we so often make, when speaking about access, is the one-dimensional thinking where we assume and reason only the angle of the farmer.
Suffice to note that this is actually the least important angle to reason from, insofar as access to technology is concerned.
It is true; access is simply the bridge between source and recipient who both have interest in it.
But because daily millions of dollars are spent both by public and private industries to build technologies, it should be obvious that the greater interest to have the technology consumed, lies with the source, namely, the inventors/ manufacturers.
Do they not do enough to enable quick and easy access to their technologies? Of course they do, otherwise it would not make any economic sense to them, unless of course they were building these technologies for philanthropy rather than for profitable enterprise, which of course they are not.
Investment and running costs, and lack of therefore do not answer or explain why thousands of classic agricultural technologies remain less utilized, despite their obvious capacity to fuel agricultural production.
What answers? Many factors, but at very rate, each must be borne of a sound understanding of the modalities beyond the bureaucracies of access and affordability, to the farmer psyche and its receivership.
c) Farmer psyche and its receivership.
The utility of any given technology is a channel, at whose one end, stands the expert and his knowledge of the technologies, and one might add, responsibility to disseminate it, and at the other end, the target consumer with his raw, if not hesitant psyche that must be brought to appreciate and acclimatize to the technology.
It is in bridging the two, where the challenge lies, in retrospect, the explanation to our question. To this end, communication, spoken as well as written, is that bridge.
Spoken is fortunately, comparatively easy to achieve, but is it the same with written? The answer is an obvious no. and that is where the farmer problem of our current generation is.
We live in the digital era, which means that much of our communication to and with the farmer, is now more than before, written/formal rather than spoken (informal).
And so it is that in this communication, should-be –simple matters of technology are made to appear, and it so often does, to the consumer, who is the lay farmer, as a very complicated matter.
You only have to read a number of online blogs dedicating as resource blogs for farmers to see how bookish gibberish is transferred to confuse and discourage farmers, including even here on steemit where several posts are daily made to instruct farmers.
Consequences
The consequence of this, of course is that farmer apathy towards the technology is created.
That occurs because the lay farmer, is approached and bombarded with the technologies’ academic/bookish gibberish of underlying principles and practices.
The funny thing is that we expect a lay farmer who has to manage other livelihood chores for him/herself and the family, to comprehend in a matter of days, what took you as a student, moreover with daily guidance, 6 to 7 hours a day, for 3 or four years!
In farmer communication, principles obviously matter, but that is only if they can be related, in simple easy to understand language in such a manner, as is sufficiently relevant to their clear comprehension and ultimately, practical application by the farmers.
Textbook and science-deep explanations do not. Telling a farmer, for example, that irrigation supplies crops with the required amount of hydrogen and oxygen, despite this being true, hardly connects nor does it practically appeal to the farmer.
Is not that, in simple practically comprehensibly terms, the same thing as saying that irrigation ensure plants have water when they need it? Yes, the lay farmer understands water, because he/she uses it every day. He/she has no interest in what the bookish/academic/science details of water contains.
So instead of talking in terms of oxygen and hydrogen, why not talk about water?
Final word
Overall, we need to revise and adopt simplistic, clear ways to communicate the complexities of our daily evolving technologies, if they are achieve their premised purpose of boosting agricultural production, upon which our world depends.