Toward an integrated agricultural information consolidation scheme for farmers in the Nigerian rural areas

Abstract

It is assumed that farmers in the Nigerian rural areas require three types of information: technology-oriented, product-demand oriented, and input-supply oriented. Extension workers have been disseminating the first type of information to the inadvertent neglect of the other two types. The farmers have not been able to take advantage of product-demand and input-supply information because of their distance from the source of this information. The high incidence of illiteracy among farmers renders a normal print medium unacceptable in the dissemination of information. A new approach toward agricultural information handling and dissemination methods is proposed. Agricultural librarians in Nigerian should reprocess and repackage this information in more appropriate media. The repackaged information could be disseminated by the extension workers in conjunction with technology information. A much closer and complimentary cooperation between extension workers and agricultural librarians is needed to achieve this.