Infotech centers benefit farmers

This is how the government’s Farmers’ Information and Technology Services (FITS) centers have expanded over the last nine years.

And through these centers, rural people, particularly farmers, have been considerably benefiting from improved agricultural technologies they provide.

FITS centers, now popularly known as Techno Pinoy, are a component of Techno Gabay Program (TGP), the banner program on technology transfer and R&D utilization of the Los Baños-based Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry and Natural Resources Research and Development (PCARRD).

A FITS center is a one-stop information shop that provides farmers, traders, entrepreneurs, processors and other stakeholders quick access to location-specific agricultural information services.

Since PCARRD launched the FITS program in 1997, 198 such centers have been set up from Batanes to Basilan, Dr. Bessie Burgos, director of PCARRD’s Technology Outreach Program Division (TOPD), reported as a press forum at the Traders’ Hotel in Manila last July 21.

Dr. Burgos said the FITS centers are based at or hosted by local government units (67 percent), state colleges and universities (19 percent), Department of Agriculture, Department of Science and Technology provincial S&T centers, Department of Environment and Natural Resources and nongovernment organizations.

The FITS centers are supported by farmer-scientists (magsasaka-siyentista) or successful farmers or farmer-leaders whose farms are showcases of "best practices." They share their technologies and practices with other farmers.

The TGP-FITS have been of great help to people in the countryside, as found in a PCARRD study done in Bacarra, Ilocos Norte; Alfonso Lista in Ifugao; and La Trinidad, Benguet.

The sites primarily produce rice, corn, and semi-temperate vegetables.

"The TGP interventions not only resulted in significant increases in output, but in farm income as well," the study noted. "Farmers, in general, said that they were better off with TGP than without it."

PCARRD concluded that because of the TGP’s viability, it is now part of the national extension strategy, as reflected in the Medium-Term Philippine Development Plan. – Rudy A. Fernandez