The main image shows parts of the town plaza of my hometown Asingan in Pangasinan, where the building in the middle is the headquarters of our Nagkaisa Multi-Purpose Coop. Looking at Nagkaisa now, I see any coop building as the location for the training following my reinvention of the Farmer Field School, FFS into the Farmer Filled School, FFS2 (see my essay, “Farmer Filled School, FFS² – My Reinvention Of The FFS Of 1987[2],” 13 June 2020, THiNK Journalism, Digital).
I see FFS² as the area of responsibility of the new DA. I see also the DA transforming all of Agriculture into digital format, stored in hard disks at DA Main, as well as its Regional Offices, the science reachable and readable by cellphone anytime anywhere.
Thinking of the new digital agriculture, New DA. Science accessible now, accessible after the lockdown. Instantly, intelligently.
Thus, for the New DA, I am now thinking of the cellphone as “the last mile” for delivering modern knowledge to the remotest places in the Philippines.
The New DA will be propagated by moving images and even moving texts – thus moving hearts, moving hands.
Farmers can then access knowledge in their language anywhere anytime. If in training, they can also interrupt themselves as they wish. Of course, they can ask any question they want, in the manner that they know how, and be respectfully responded to, if remotely.
We must, we can now bring the digital revolution to the farmers!
Regional DA offices will now be the regional centers of the New DA, as they can directly deal with the farmers in their locations if farmers have to visit them.
In my mind, for the New DA, the ideal grouping of farmers is what I refer to as the Super Coop, which becomes their common business manager. The idea of the “Super Coop” I first wrote about 7 years ago (“The Super Coops of 2014[3],” 30 October 2013, Nagkaisa). (Nagkaisa I already mentioned above.)
The new DA will assist each Super Coop obtain resources from government as well as the private sector in matters of common business interests. Through the Super Coop, farmer members will learn to become entrepreneurs and not simply cultivators of the soil and sellers of harvests.
The DA will extend all kinds of assistances to the Super Coops. Among other things, the headquarters, HQ, of a Super Coop will need any number of personal computers with WiFi connections. HQ will also maintain an active link with the municipal and provincial agricultural offices.
Digital: The All-New DA!@517
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