Agricultural Technology Extension Research Articles

Exploration of practice and optimization of strategies for conservation of cultivated land resources in contemporary China’s rural areas—Centering on black soil conservation and others

Cultivated land resources are the basic elements for rural development and farmers’ survival in China. Strengthening the protection of cultivated land is an important measure to ensure national food security and practice the strategy of “storing grain in the land and technology”, and it is also an inevitable requirement to promote the high-quality development of agriculture. The protection of cultivated land in contemporary China has gone through three stages: the initial exploration period of reconciliation between economic development and the number of cultivated land, the institutional development period of construction occupation and cultivated land quality management and protection, and the transformation and improvement period of “Trinity” in the new era. In the new era, cultivated land protection has achieved phased results, but it still faces practical constraints from the actors, technical environment, institutional environment and so on. In view of this, we should explore the breakthrough path to further promote cultivated land protection from the aspects of strengthening organizational guidance and technical training, strengthening the top-level design of differentiated cultivated land protection, strengthening the research and development of new technologies and the construction of agricultural technology extension system.

Improvement and Thinking of Some Farmers’ Thought in Agricultural Technology Extension Service

Improvement and Thinking of Some Farmers’ Thought in Agricultural Technology Extension Service

Effects of social capital on farmers’ choices of climate change adaptation behavior in Dazu District, China

ABSTRACT This study explores the effects of social capital on farmers’ choices of climate change adaptation behavior in Dazu District, China. A total of 228 questionnaires were obtained from randomly sampled households. Social capital was divided into social networks, participation, reciprocity and trust. The adaptation behaviors in the study area were identified as crop adjustment, environmental improvement, financial management, and livelihood diversification. A boosted regression tree model was used to analyze the effects of different dimensions of social capital on farmers’ choices of climate change adaptation behavior. The results show that most farmers in Dazu District of Chongqing have adopted crop adjustment adaptation behavior. The social capital and socioeconomic characteristics of farmers have different impacts on different adaptation behaviors. Among social capital, the largest influence on climate change adaptation behavior is the degree of trust in the information of agricultural technology extension service centers, and the lowest influence is participation in rural cooperatives. In terms of socioeconomic characteristics, the largest impact on climate change adaptation behavior is agricultural income share, and the lowest impact is gender. The findings of this study can provide empirical support for governments to formulate effective policies to improve farmers’ climate change adaptation capabilities.

Agricultural Technology Extension and Sustainable Development of Agriculture

Agricultural Technology Extension and Sustainable Development of Agriculture

Talking about the Dynamic Mechanism of Cooperation among Diversified Agricultural Technology Extension Organizations

Talking about the Dynamic Mechanism of Cooperation among Diversified Agricultural Technology Extension Organizations

The Role and Countermeasures of Agricultural Technology Extension in Agricultural Production under the New Situation

The Role and Countermeasures of Agricultural Technology Extension in Agricultural Production under the New Situation

Transferring knowledge and innovations through village knowledge center in Tanzania: approaches, impact and impediments

PurposeFarmers in rural areas are generally not well empowered with knowledge and innovations to solve their agricultural problems in spite of the growing presence of such knowledge resulting from research and innovation activities across the globe. This study aims to document approaches, impact and impediments of using village knowledge centers (VKCs) to transfer agricultural knowledge and innovations.Design/methodology/approachTo achieve the objective of the study, a case study research design was used to investigate the impact of a selected VKC as institutional innovation in agricultural technology outreach and extension in rural Tanzania. Primary data was collected through semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions and observation methods. Besides, secondary sources such as reports were used to complement primary data during fieldwork.FindingsThe study reveals that various approaches are used by the VKC to transfer knowledge and innovation to farmers. The use of the multi-actor platform (MAP) to run the VKC ensures inclusive knowledge production and sharing among different actors. The findings also suggest that knowledge and innovation co-creation is constructed with various knowledge systems actors to enhance the use of research generated. Accordingly, the findings show that the university efforts are an important catalyst for integrated knowledge, technology and innovation systems in rural settings.Research limitations/implicationsThe present study reveals different limitations associated with the use of a single case study design. The single-case design provided researchers with little basis for generalisation of the study findings and conclusions. Aside from that, the use of a cross-sectional design did not help the researchers to validate the findings and conclusions. To address these limitations, the study recommends similar studies that will adopt different types of longitudinal design such as cohort and diary methods. Apart from this, a future study to investigate the tangible impact of VKC on knowledge and innovation transfer is recommended.Originality/valueConsidering the novelty of the MAP approach in Tanzania and the dearth of studies reporting on how the village knowledge center works and how effective it is, the present study provides insights on the approaches, impact and impediments.

Peer effects, attention allocation and farmers' adoption of cleaner production technology: Taking green control techniques as an example

As a typical clean production technology, green control techniques and their adoption are influenced by peer effects. Thus, what is the formation mechanism of the peer effects? Will there be a heterogeneous impact due to differences in the social network position of farmers? Will this impact be moderated by attention allocation? To answer these questions, based on the survey data for 1109 farmers in five provinces on the North China Plain, this paper adopted the IV-Probit model and other research methods. We found peer effects in the adoption behavior of green control techniques among farmers, which only existed in core and intermediate farmers and not in marginal farmers. The peer effects of the farmers' adoption behavior of green control techniques mainly came from the learning imitation mechanism. With the enhancement of farmers' attention allocation, the peer effects of farmers' adoption behavior of green control techniques strengthened. Therefore, it is necessary to give full consideration to the positive role of peer effects on farmers, improve the attention allocation level of farmers, and provide the service resources for agricultural technology extension to marginal farmers to accelerate the diffusion of green control techniques.

A Dynamic Attention and Multi-Strategy-Matching Neural Network Based on Bert for Chinese Rice-Related Answer Selection

To allow the intelligent detection of correct answers in the rice-related question-and-answer (Q&A) communities of the “China Agricultural Technology Extension Information Platform”, we propose an answer selection model with dynamic attention and multi-strategy matching (DAMM). According to the characteristics of the rice-related dataset, the twelve-layer Chinese Bert pre-training model was employed to vectorize the text data and was compared with Word2vec, GloVe, and TF-IDF (Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency) methods. It was concluded that Bert could effectively solve the agricultural text’s high dimensionality and sparsity problems. As well as the problem of polysemy having different meanings in different contexts, dynamic attention with two different filtering strategies was used in the attention layer to effectively remove the sentence’s noise. The sentence representation of question-and-answer sentences was obtained. Secondly, two matching strategies (Full matching and Attentive matching) were introduced in the matching layer to complete the interaction between sentence vectors. Thirdly, a bi-directional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) network spliced the sentence vectors obtained from the matching layer. Finally, a classifier was employed to calculate the similarity of splicing vectors, and the semantic correlation between question-and-answer sentences was acquired. The experimental results showed that DAMM had the best performance in the rice-related answer selection dataset compared with the other six answer selection models, of which MAP (Mean Average Precision) and MRR (Mean Reciprocal Rank) of DAMM gained 85.7% and 88.9%, respectively. Compared with the other six kinds of answer selection models, we present a new state-of-the-art method with the rice-related answer selection dataset.

The Importance of Agricultural Technology Extension in Agricultural Science and Technology Progress

The Importance of Agricultural Technology Extension in Agricultural Science and Technology Progress

Spatiotemporal characteristics and influencing factors of agricultural eco-efficiency in Jilin agricultural production zone from a low carbon perspective

Agricultural eco-efficiency is a meaningful index that assesses agricultural sustainable development. Based on the super SBM-DEA approach incorporating agricultural carbon emissions and panel data regression, this study evaluates agricultural eco-efficiency and investigates the influencing factors in the agricultural production zone of Jilin Province. The empirical results show the following. (1) During the observation period, the average agricultural eco-efficiency exhibits a flat "M-shaped" fluctuating trend, a trend of fluctuant growth with phase characteristics, and the agricultural eco-efficiency of each county still has much room for improvement. (2) Significant spatial differences exist in agricultural eco-efficiency across counties. All of the studied counties, except for Nong'an, Huadian, Lishu, Yitong, Gongzhuling, and Qianguo, need to change their input and output structure to optimize agricultural eco-efficiency. (3) The panel data regression estimation results indicate that the agricultural technology extension level, multiple-crop index, agricultural economic development level, agricultural technology extension level, and urbanization level have close correlations with agricultural eco-efficiency. (4) The research findings have important implications for policy makers formulating agricultural environmental policies in accordance with the local conditions of various counties.

Impact of farmer field schools on agricultural technology extension—evidence from greenhouse vegetable farms in China

ABSTRACT Agricultural extension is a key instrument to bridge the gap between new technologies and farmers. As a popular extension approach, farmer field schools (FFS) usually improve farmers’ knowledge and crop productivity. This study aims to quantify the heterogeneous impact of FFS on the cognition and adoption of multiple new agricultural technologies. In this study, we apply Tobit models to estimate the impact of FFS on technology extension regarding farmers’ cognition and adoption rates of different technologies, using data collected for 274 tomato and cucumber farm households in Beijing, China. We find that the FFS programmesignificantly increased farmers’ cognition and adoption of new agricultural technologies. We also find that the effects of FFS on extension vary in different categories of new technology. Particularly, we find that the extension of facility technologies is difficult, and new varieties are easy to disseminate but difficult to adopt by farmers. We conclude that FFS is an important channel for the extension of new agricultural technologies. At the same time, attention should be paid to the design of the FFS programme, adjusting to the attribute of different technologies.

PEMBINAAN KELOMPOK TANI DENGAN PENYULUHAN PENINGKATAN KESEHATAN TERNAK SAPI DAN PEMANFAATAN LIMBAH TERNAK MENJADI KOMPOS

Community Service entitled: "Niti Sari Farmer Group Development in Baturiti Village, Baturiti District" is one of the Udayana Program Grants for the Community. The purpose of this service is to provide guidance to the Niti Sari Farmer Group on how to improve the health of cattle and utilize agricultural waste into organic plus compost. The method used to achieve this goal begins with providing counseling to members of the Niti Sari Farmer Group, then supported by direct practice in the field. The counseling provided includes: Cattle health counseling, cattle reproductive health education, appropriate agricultural technology extension by utilizing agricultural waste using Trichoderma mushrooms to make compost plus. The compost plus Trichoderma produced in this training is expected to be able to solve the problem of Niti Sari's cabbage plant disease. The counseling activity was opened by the Head of Baturiti Sub-District, Chairperson of LPPM Unud, Tripika Baturiti District, Village Head and Village officials, Niti Sari Farmer Group and Farmer Group in Baturiti and Tamantanda Villages. Thus, it is hoped that the Niti Sari Farmer Group and the surrounding Farmer Groups will be able to absorb the transfer of technology taught by the service team from Udayana University.

A Densely Connected GRU Neural Network Based on Coattention Mechanism for Chinese Rice-Related Question Similarity Matching

In the question-and-answer (Q&A) communities of the “China Agricultural Technology Extension Information Platform”, thousands of rice-related Chinese questions are newly added every day. The rapid detection of the same semantic question is the key to the success of a rice-related intelligent Q&A system. To allow the fast and automatic detection of the same semantic rice-related questions, we propose a new method based on the Coattention-DenseGRU (Gated Recurrent Unit). According to the rice-related question characteristics, we applied word2vec with the TF-IDF (Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency) method to process and analyze the text data and compare it with the Word2vec, GloVe, and TF-IDF methods. Combined with the agricultural word segmentation dictionary, we applied Word2vec with the TF-IDF method, effectively solving the problem of high dimension and sparse data in the rice-related text. Each network layer employed the connection information of features and all previous recursive layers’ hidden features. To alleviate the problem of feature vector size increasing due to dense splicing, an autoencoder was used after dense concatenation. The experimental results show that rice-related question similarity matching based on Coattention-DenseGRU can improve the utilization of text features, reduce the loss of features, and achieve fast and accurate similarity matching of the rice-related question dataset. The precision and F1 values of the proposed model were 96.3% and 96.9%, respectively. Compared with seven other kinds of question similarity matching models, we present a new state-of-the-art method with our rice-related question dataset.

How social capital affects willingness of farmers to accept low-carbon agricultural technology (LAT)? A case study of Jiangsu, China

PurposeLow-carbon agricultural technology (LAT) extension is a key strategy for the agricultural sector to address climate change. Social capital, which consists of social networks, trust and norms, can play an active LAT extension role. This paper aims to analyze the mechanism of the role of social capital in the process of LAT extension.Design/methodology/approachQuestionnaire data from six counties in Jiangsu, China, were used to measure social capital and analyze its effect on LAT extension using logistic regression. Data from 27 interviews were used to analyze the LAT extension experiences and problems.FindingsLAT is mainly deployed by the government to farmers and distributed among them. In this process, the village officials who form parts of the government’s composition and the villagers play a dual role that facilitates a close link between them and the farmers and ensures LAT integration. However, social norms did not play a significant role in the process.Practical implicationsFarmers’ acceptance of LAT is based solely on the trade-off between local networks’ benefits and trust in local villagers and village officials. LAT-related laws and technical measures, thus are essential to strengthen LAT practices’ authority and incorporate LAT-based agricultural production as the norm of production behavior.Originality/valueThis paper provides an insight into the process and essence of farmers’ acceptance of LAT, which provides theoretical lessons for the LAT extension in China and indeed other developing countries.

Research on the Promotion Effect of Grass-roots Agricultural Science and Technology Extension on Agricultural Economic Development

Research on the Promotion Effect of Grass-roots Agricultural Science and Technology Extension on Agricultural Economic Development

Problems and Countermeasures of Agricultural Technology Extension in New Era

Problems and Countermeasures of Agricultural Technology Extension in New Era

Key Points of Agricultural Technology Extension and Rice Cultivation Technology

Key Points of Agricultural Technology Extension and Rice Cultivation Technology

Analysis of Multiple Subjects in Agricultural Technology Extension from the Perspective of Precision Poverty Alleviation

Analysis of Multiple Subjects in Agricultural Technology Extension from the Perspective of Precision Poverty Alleviation

Research on the Research of Agricultural Technology Extension Approaches in the Internet Era

Research on the Research of Agricultural Technology Extension Approaches in the Internet Era