The Front-line demonstrations is to demonstrate newly released crop production and protection technologies and its management practices in the farmers’ field under different agro-climatic regions and farming situation. While demonstrating the technologies in the farmers’’ fields, the scientists are required to study the factors contributing higher crop production, field constraints of production and thereby generate production data and feedback information. Front line demonstrations are conducted in a block of two to four hectares land in order to have better impact of the demonstrated technologies on the farmers and field level extension functionaries.
The front-line demonstrations are different than the normal demonstrations conducted by the extension functionaries. The special features of FLD are;
- FLD are conducted under the close supervision of the scientists
- Only newly released technologies or those likely to be released in near future are selected
- FLDs are organized in a block of two to four hectares involving all those farmers whose plots fall in the identified demonstration block.
- Only critical inputs and training are provided from the scheme budget, remaining inputs are supplied by the farmers themselves
- Training of the farmers associated with the frontline demonstration is a pre-requisite for conducting such demonstrations
- The target audience of FLDs is both farmers and the extension officers. The purpose is to be convince extension functionaries and farmers together about the potentialities of technologies for further wide scale diffusion
- FLDs are used as a source of generating data on factors contributing higher crop yields and constraints of production under various farming situations.
