Traditional and Modern Approaches in Agricultural Extension Practice in Nigeria

Abstract

Access to appropriate and timely agricultural extension services has remained an enduring input in the alleviation of rural poverty. A pluralistic approach to agricultural extension services by government, farmer-based organization, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and active participants in agricultural value chain will help facilitate the needed advisory services in order to achieve improvement in livelihoods and reduce vulnerability. The exponential growth rate resulting in population explosion, fast rising vagaries in technology use, heightened increase in livelihood vulnerabilities and the impact of climate change; have further mandated the need for a holistic and urgent review of the approach to extension service delivery. The training and visit system, on-farm visits, village meetings, pilot projects, farmer’s field school, and model villages are among the long-standing public extension approaches. These approaches are largely being taken over by private extension organizations who have adopted the more satisfactory participatory, bottom-up decentralized and ICT compliant approaches. In view of the foregoing, there is now an urgent need to appraise both the existing traditional and emerging modern approaches. This article therefore reviewed and compared the two approaches with the possibility of having a blend of the two; so as to attain a reduction in vulnerabilities and an improvement in livelihoods and national development. Therefore, the study recommends a combination of both the traditional and modern approaches in a decentralized fashion, rather than the conventional linear (top-down) approach.