As important participants and decision-makers in agricultural production, smallholders play a significant role in food production. The low level of technology awareness and capability of smallholders leads to problems such as insufficient technology adoption.
With their poor risk tolerance and lack of confidence in new technologies, this drives them to actively adopt green production technologies, which seriously hinders the green transformation of agriculture. What should be done to encourage small farmers to actively adopt green production technologies? The existence of multiple social services and agricultural technology dissemination systems offers a potential solution.
Existing production agricultural expansion is divided into two distinct approaches: top to bottom and bottom to top. The first begins with scientists creating innovative technologies in the laboratory and smallholders through organizations such as Agricultural Technology Extension Service Centers (ATESC). This mode ignores the motivation of smallholders, and trust issues arising from unequal quality of services become a significant impediment to technology dissemination.
The latter approach is primarily based on demand for small holders’ production technologies and social services through participatory technological innovation, resulting in localized technologies and dissemination. However, because this approach requires simultaneous learning of scientists and small holders, it is less controllable and runs the risk of being a formality.
We recognize that there is a need for an intimate partnership with smallholders, while empowering them through zero-distance social services and their desire to actively adopt green production technologies to create a sustainable mechanism for sustainable green production. to encourage
A good example of this is the Science and Technology Backyard (STB) established by the team of Professor Fusuo Zhang of China Agricultural University. STB’s teachers and graduate students are permanently rooted at the frontline of rural production, creating a distinctive bottom-up approach to technological innovation through continuous interaction, learning and co-innovation with smallholders.
This mode solves the problem of adaptive technological innovation and effectively promotes the application of green production technologies at various scales, but how to gradually realize the spread of technological innovation from experimental areas to regional level is still is not clear.
Therefore, the authors take Wangzhuang STBs in Quzhou, Hebei, China, as a research object, and explore how STBs empower smallholders through participatory technology innovation and a social service with multi-unit participation. Builds their constant trust through mode, and promotes technology. Participatory innovation in a collaborative, tree shape and jump-start dissemination mode to promote the dissemination of participatory technology innovation across various scales such as farmers, villages and counties.
This type of technology dissemination based on STBs empowers smallholders through zero-distance social services and effectively solves the problem from technology innovation to technology diffusion in this area, which is a highly applicable and practical technology. Innovation and diffusion is the mode and an effective way to promote it. Sustainable adoption of green production technologies by smallholders.