Agricultural research and technology transfer.

Dear readers, after making one of my publications regarding the agricultural field as usual, a good friend in one of the comments told me that I was not sure that the adaptation to new sustainable productive models was rapid, such a perception is not far from reality, because at the moment at least in my country Venezuela, there are very few technological strategies implemented by producers, firstly, because of the little socialization or transfer of technology generated by agricultural research institutes and universities. Some aspects of participatory agricultural research can be found at the following link:

Based on these premises, the idea arises to share some views on the matter, I will begin by pointing out that the possible reasons why technological socialization cannot be realized may be due to the lack of research aimed at solving the problems presented by agricultural production units or simply do not exist programs well-designed agricultural extension that aims to share and educate producers on the various current agro-ecological techniques. The idea would be that after sharing the knowledge and proving that it is effective, teach the producer how it is applied, doing a technical accompaniment until you get the necessary skills.

The above may sound very ambitious, but, for no one it is a secret that the agricultural sector is one of the most important in a nation, since, in addition to generating good economic income by exports that can be made, also contributes to countries' food security. Experimental stations or research institutes should focus their efforts on finding solutions to agricultural problems and verify the behavior of certain technical experiences from other geographical areas and that according to the conditions They can be successfully implemented.

For the generation of techniques and their transfer there are a series of steps that make it a thorough process; as a first step ideas must be generated from a specific problem or phenomenon, for this purpose, a diagnosis must be carried out by a multidisciplinary team of researchers, taking into account the circumstances of agricultural areas, a kind of zoning could be made by homogenizing rural areas by environmental characteristics, soil types among other fundamental elements.

As a second step, once the problems have been evidenced through diagnosis, we should proceed to the implementation of experimental trials using different methods and experimental designs to evaluate some variables of productive interest, environmental and morphological in plants with the implementation of any innovative technique that you want to put into practice. The third step corresponds to the socialization and validation of the technique evaluated for this, talks must be implemented, field days among other informal educational methods with the intention of convincing the producer to implement this technique on his farm to validate it and observe the results at the farm level and calculate the costs per hectare. The final step would logically be the adoption of such technology by the producer, which is the result of the previous step where the effectiveness of the same was verified and it is given the necessary knowledge to continue implementing it regularly.

Dear readers, as we have seen in research and technology transfer in the agricultural sector, in order to solve problems that arise in an efficient and objective manner, I believe that the multidisciplinary team should be trained in the implementation of appropriate educational methods that allow producers to understand the techniques developed, taking into account that some do not know the scientific and technical terms used.