Background

FFS as an extension approach grew as a response to a rice insect outbreak in the 1980s in Indonesia. Methods of delivering messages were often inappropriate and too simple to deal with complex problems. Instead, it proved necessary to ensure local decision making by farmers in their own fields. The hands-on practical learning in FFS, building on adult education principles and experiential learning emerged as a mean of facilitating critical decision-making skills among farmers to deal with complex farming problems.

FFS is a school without walls that provides a forum where farmers meet regularly to make field observations, relate their observations to the ecosystem and apply their previous experience and any new information for informed crop or livestock management decisions. FFS operates through groups of people with a common interest, who get together on a regular basis to study the “how and why” of a particular topic.