While the “disconnected” farmers were concerned about the lack of
access to knowledge and information due to their lack of interaction
with other actors, for the “well connected” farmers the concernwas different.
They underlined the fact that those actors who plan research,
build curricula for farming education, train agricultural engineers and
design agricultural policy, do not ask farmers to share their experiences
and, hence, they are not aware of the real problems of Tunisian agriculture.
Another problem they identified was a lack of experience of many
of the extension agents, agricultural engineers and researchers. The
interviews revealed that for farmers, “experience” represents tacit,
context-specific, localized knowledge, and could be gained principally
through practicing agriculture. Interestingly, several of the interviewed
farmers expressed the view that the role of researchers should be to
transfer experience-based ideas of farmers to the higher levels of
authority where they could be implemented.