own claims to be helping development and therefore deserving of more

resources.

 These facts highlight alternative (or additional) roles for exten-

sion systems. If extension agents can learn superior techniques from the

most advanced farmers, they can then help spread this information to other

farmers and to researchers. Effective feedback from farmers can certainly

indicate which innovations from researchers are relevant to farmers'

needs and what sorts of further improvements are needed. Feedback is

essential to researchers to learn how an innovation 'fits -into the farmers'

overall farming system and seasonal labor constraints and opportunities.

Moreover, specific superior varieties and cultural practices of advanced

farmers can often be brought directly into research programs. One obser-

ver sums up this perspective:

 Extension workers learn from progressive farmers what to tell
 others. In fact, much agricultural development in such
 countries as Holland can be explained by this mechanism of
 locally originated innovation rather than by the utilization
 of agricultural research station finding.1

Similar observations could be made about the U.S., where farm bureau

agents originally saw their task as facilitating exchange of ideas among

farmers, and not conveying new ideas from research stations to farmers.

This would suggest that the early U.S. and European information exchange

systems might have relevant lessons for current needs elsewhere. Feedback

is also needed to designers of extension communications, so they will

know how to plan effective radio programs or other formats for communication.


 Niels Roling, Joseph Ascroft, and Fred Wa Chege, "The Diffusion
of Innovations and the Issue of Equity in Rural Development," in Everett
Rogers, ed., Communication and Development: Critical Perspectives (Beverly
Hills: Sage, 1976), p. 68, citing observations of Professor A.W. van den
Ban, Agricultural University, Wegeningen.