Mexican technical and extension staff trained to facilitate Field Schools

• The objective is that people who work as technicians and extensionists in the state of Jalisco can develop field schools on sustainable livestock farming for producer families.

October 25, 2022. As part of the Biodiversity and Sustainable Agro-silvo-pastoral Livestock Landscapes project, known as BioPaSOS, CATIE (Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Center) and the Secretariat of Agriculture and Rural Development (SADER, its Spanish acronym) of the state of Jalisco, Mexico, held a course-workshop from October 17 to 21, in which 18 people (including five women) were trained as facilitators of the methodological approach to learning called Field Schools (ECA, its Spanish acronym).

The objective is to strengthen the knowledge and skills of those who work as technicians and extensionists in the use of participatory tools and the ECA methodology, so that they can apply them in the processes they lead with producer families from public and private institutions in Jalisco.

Extensionists from all over the state of Jalisco were present, focusing on different sectors: beekeeping, livestock, aquaculture and agro-forestry; also present were technicians focused on the development of the rural agricultural sector from the different inter-municipal boards of the state and technicians from the Agency for Health, Safety and Agri-Food Quality (ASICA, its Spanish acronym).

"Through this course we want to achieve a meeting point with Jalisco's producers so that they can learn to make the right decisions about their production chains, with the aim of making them more profitable and environmentally friendly. This work foresees the implementation of Field Schools in our state, in order to achieve a process of knowledge management and capacity building in the primary sector," commented Carlos Alberto Jiménez Garma, Director of Production Chains and Sustainability at SADER.

Juan Edduardo Betanzos, local coordinator of Project BioPaSOS in Jalisco, indicated that the course-workshop concluded satisfactorily, with trained technical personnel and a tool that promotes participatory processes in the rural sector, as well as solutions to the various problems that arise in the productive sectors of the state of Jalisco.

The course-workshop took place at SADER's facilities and was facilitated by José Antonio Jiménez, local coordinator of the BioPaSOS project in Chiapas; Francisco Casasola, specialist in training facilitators in the ECA methodology of CATIE; and Betanzos.