New opportunities for agricultural extension services: Mainstreaming large-scale farmer participation through modern ICT

Smallholder farmers across the Global South increasingly need to adapt their farming activities to fast-paced changes, for example, in climate, policy and markets. In many places, public and private agricultural extension services support technological change through trainings and the dissemination of information. The effectiveness of extant ex-tension (advisory) methodologies is, however, challenged by the difficulty of reaching a large and growing clientele with highly diverse information needs. In recent years, the increasing penetration of modern information and communication technology (ICT) has created new opportunities for disseminating agricultural information more widely. In ad-dition, modern ICT may allow harnessing the existing heterogeneity of farmers and farms in a positive way. Through digital communication, large numbers of farmers can be in-volved not only as recipients of advice, but also in the creation of knowledge and infor-mation. By collecting well-defined data inputs from farmers through digital channels, and processing these data in systematic ways, agricultural advisory services can potentially improve their overall performance towards a large and heterogeneous clientele. This dissertation intends to explore these emerging socio-technological opportunities. Through three proof-of-concept studies, it delivers empirical evidence on the feasibility of different ways of employing modern ICT to harness large-scale farmer participation in agricultural extension. Subsequently, it discusses potential practical implications for the ability of extension services to serve large numbers of farmers, working in heterogeneous conditions, with individually adequate advice. The dissertation follows a three-pronged approach. It focuses on three selected, but common shortcomings of agricultural exten-sion, all of which are due to the inherent scale and complexity of the smallholder farming context that needs to be served. To each shortcoming, one research paper explores a novel concept of enabling large-scale farmer participation through modern ICT, as a potential solution