ISPA Account
Science and Technology Backyard
Science and Technology Backyards (STBs) were introduced by China Agricultural University in 2009. It is a farming service model designed to reinforce relational embeddedness between education, research, and extension at the community level to provide agricultural extension and advisory services to smallholder farmers. STB can be considered a hybrid model that combines a top-down approach with bottom-up measures to promote innovation among smallholder farmers. In STBs, technological innovation is supposed to derive from location-specific problem diagnosis and is re-fitted based on local context and farmer demand. To learn more read the Li et al. 2022 paper here.