There are different ways of doing this that we have tried fairly successfully.

These include - Community Participatory approaches, Social Mobilization, Demonstration and Incentives & penalties.

There has to be massive sensitization and awareness campaign on the relevance of conservation agriculture (via seminars, village surveys, workshops, talks, community meetings)

The approach must not isolate the local farmers in all its aspects from decision making to implementation (ensuring active community participation)

Appropriate reward systems must be put in place to reward persons and agencies that support and promote CA in the respective communities

Firm and stringent penalties must be imposed on culprits who engage in unsustainable agricultural practices that imprisons CA initiatives

Very good responses from two of our colleagues, Emmanuel and Dickson. Lets take different components of CA to practice one by one, instill confidence gradually, experience the benefits of CA by farmers themselves and more importantly, identify those areas need exclusive adoption of CA...

The mind set of farmers will change only when they try it themselves. Adopt a mechanism through which they get an opportunity to practice CA on their own fields and see for themselves that there is no yield loss. The real benefits of CA become only after practicing CA continuously for a couple of years.

This problem is often faced when we are dealing with farmers having orthodox mindset and who don't want to give up their traditional agricultural practices. The best way to deal with this and to affect a change is demonstrations. Seeing is believing. Unless they see the results of a new process or technology, they won't adopt that.

First, as researcher, you need make a comparative economic analysis of Conservation Agriculture and Conventional Agriculture. The calculation must take into account all of the inputs, including labor, with comparision to the yields. A specific analysis must be made of the inputs that need expenses and the inputs that are not to paid by the farmer. The time needed for production in each kind of agriculture must be also compared.

This economic analysis will be completed with a participatory evaluation (including gender analysis) of conservation agriculture farming process compared to that of conventional agriculture..

FAO, for the last many years, is emphasizing on conservation agriculture but unfortunately the conventional mindset of chemical agriculture is working behind mono cropping, cash crops with high doses of chemical fertilizers in spite of doing agroforestry and enhancing biodiversity.

Climate smart agricultural practices with ecofriendly organic field practices can be a sustainable solution with better local marketing system.

Identifying crops and agro-pedological conditions where CA deserves to be practiced , need a thorough revisiting , instead of advocating the adoption of CA, regardless of conditions, whether or not , they permit...Very often , it reminds me of organic agriculture , its the same story . So such concepts need to revised in terms of which field has dos and donts to arrive at possible success of CA, then only , i think , CA could find a place what it deserves....

Extension work....Lab to Land

Dear Anoop,

The best example in my mind is Hara Farms at Yamuna Nagar, India which we visited during end of 2015. The smallholders can adapt the models in various agroecosystems with available resources. They would learn when they do it on their farms.

If trials with a full conventional agrichemical approach can be compared to systems which are optimized for the alternative biologically based system are compared side by side and quantitated measurements compiled including the yield quality and economic and environmental effects this can be foundation to invite farmers and policy makers to field days. This approach is powerful and overtime can convince many of the utility of alternative approaches based on proven results.

extension work is required to take the research in to their land

Many thanks to all the contributors, who suggested the ways to scale-out CA in our condition.

Several good comments and suggestions have been made. However, blaming poor people is not always based on facts, rather on the basis of misconception of scientists and extension experts. Let me put a few ideas in the form of hypothesis. In fact some of the ideas may have empirical evidence.

Because of poverty and high risk aversion behaviour, any technology with only conservation function may have low probability of adoption. If a technology gives medium to high yield increase along with medium to high conservation benefits, its chances of adoption may be medium to high. High yield with low conservation may also be adopted but low low yield and low conservation function has poor adoptibility. Ad to these matrices economic outcomes of each combination to predict adoptibility to get a better picture.

Initially, even good economic viability may not be enough. More incentives may be required in the form of subsidy to popularize and demonstrate benefits. People may have to be paid to love the land for the benefit of future generation.

Hope this is useful.

Because the farmer does not share the same vision. The farmers are not compelled to adopt any change unless there are immediate benefits on gaining high yield and/or reduced cost.

My experience tells that CA is not merely a technology rather it is more policy related. Multidisciplinary team of scientists, extensionists, and farmers should work together to generate and verify the technologies. And for its promotion it needs a concentrated efforts of public-private -partnership.

An intersting post . Thats the reason , why the impact of CA is far from reality ...even now...