By farmers for farmers: exploring the process of peer learning in Papua New Guinea

Since the 1940s, education for agricultural development in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has been led by agricultural extensionists who typically share new practices and knowledge with farmers in a subject-centred way. Although more participatory practices, such as farmer field schools, have emerged in the last decade, the ‘technology transfer’ model that brings a body of knowledge to impart to farmers in a top-down way continues to be the dominant model in PNG. Today there is an increasing focus on farmer-centred approaches to agricultural extension however little is known about how learning is transferred farmer to farmer. This report is drawn from a small project that explored farmer-to-farmer learning in one highlands site. It was conducted by the University of Canberra’s (UC) Centre for Sustainable Communities as part of a large Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) project Sustaining soil fertility in support of intensification of sweetpotato cropping systems (SLAM/2017/041).