Significant Contribution of Farmer First in Farmer-Trainer for Environmentally-Friendly Agriculture and Rural Development

抄録

With the huge number of mouths to feed, problems and challenges on food safety and sufficiency in terms of the decreasing number of new farmers and increasing number of aging farmers arises in Japan and the Philippines. Young generations do not see farming as a lucrative career. In order to attract the youth to engage into farming, one of the potential solutions is the farmer-trainer, which is a generic term used to address farmers that provides and conducts training to farmers, and other actors in a community. As a farmer-trainer, farmer also serves as an innovator and educator and promoter of indigenous knowledge that are environmentally-friendly and safe. Prior to conducting research on farmer-trainer, this paper initially aims to identify the stakeholders and their respective roles, and to review the development and contribution of farmer first movement that significantly affect the farmers to invent, try, and share the new knowledge and innovations to other farmers and actors in their respective communities since 1987. Upon reviewing related literatures on farmer first and examining farmer-conducted trainings in the Philippines and Japan using case study approach, it became clearer that farmer first movement still plays a very important role in extending agricultural knowledge and technologies that are environmentally-friendly and contributes to rural development. This research highlights the importance of farmer first movement in boosting confidence of farmers to conduct their own trainings and to spread safe, environmentally-friendly agricultural systems especially for rural development through the development of “theme-community”.