Integrating " Farmer Field School" and " Promoting Farmer Innovation" Approaches: Implications for Innovation Diffusion in Context of Sustainable Agricultural Development

Today, as importance of innovation in process of development and transfer of agricultural technologies is constantly increasing, institutional agents of agricultural research, training and extension try to provide a flexible framework for a further participation of their clients. Therefore, they tend to focus on formulating and developing approaches in which the agricultural development and extension actors as facilitators are assumed to accompany farmers and rural groups in order to produce, adapt, develop, and apply the knowledge and technologies appropriate to local conditions. “Farmer Field School” and “Promoting Farmer Innovation” approaches have been developed for the same purpose. In these approaches, a main concern is an explanation of sustainable resource management in the agriculture sector to provide food security and sustainable subsistence, and a fundamental function includes an increase in capacity of farmers and rural communities to achieve a balanced development in sustainable productivity and management domain of agricultural resources, emphasizing on pragmatic participatory approaches. This paper is presented to introduce basics, principles, structural-functional features, and role of these two approaches in drawing upon the farmers, innovations to transfer the appropriate and adaptable technologies in the context of sustainable agricultural development.