Soft technology development in an agricultural R&D project: Farmer empowerment to bring about practice change, lesson learnt from Eastern Indonesia

Abstract

Sustainable practice change from agricultural research and development projects in Indonesia has been a tangible issue. Many farmers return to their previous behavior after the project finished. On the other hand, a lot of R&D projects focused on hard technologies development while often overlooked methods and approaches required in changing farmers practice. At the same time, the government’s institutions to support and spread the practice change like extension institutions have also been in disarray. The aim of this paper is to provide another perspective on approach and methods to bring about change in farmers’ practice in agricultural R&D projects that involve multi stakeholders. A case study research was conducted on a pilot project during September 2009 in Oebola village, Kupang District. It was a collaborative project between IAARD Indonesia and ACIAR Australia on integrated crop-livestock system base. Methods for data collection in this study included document analysis, focus group discussion, in-depth interview and direct observation. The study found that partner farmers in the project willingly changed their practices and promised themselves to keep practicing the new ones. This was attributed to the soft technology developed during the project life including participatory need and opportunity assessment, multi stakeholder linkage under participatory communication framework and participatory learning for action based on adult learning principles. By the time the study was conducted, the practice change spread widely from only seven collaborative farmers to majority of farmers in Oebola and the neighboring villages. Furthermore, the provincial Office of Agriculture and partner NGO have implemented model from this pilot project in their respective programs.