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The available literature on urban agriculture training and extension is contradictory in its conclusions. Some sources indicate that urban farmers are highly dynamic and innovative (hydroponics, warehouses, drip irrigation, rooftop farming, reuse of organic wastes and waste water, niche products) trying out new products and techniques not hindered by the traditions in rural farming. Others come to the conclusion that urban producers are hardly interested in trying out new things. Factors that may explain this behaviour include the poverty of a substantial number of the urban producers, insecurity of land use, lack of extension services for urban farmers and limited technology development for urban agriculture.

Although the head offices of most extension organisations, training and research institutes are located in the cities, UA producers do often have not have access to these services, because of a lack of recognition of UA from the side of these institutes and a lack of organisation on the side of urban producers.

A major challenge for the coming years is to prepare training and extension services (be it governmental, municipal, university services, NGOs or private sector) better for providing relevant advice to urban farmers, for example related to ecologically friendly production, processing and marketing techniques that can be applied in space-confined areas or related to safe use of urban resources such as organic wastes and waste water and multi-functional land use (e.g. combining UA with recreation, landscape management, water storage). Also successful rural extension and training methodologies (e.g. the farmer to farmer approach, farmer field schools, participatory technology development) need to be adapted to the urban conditions.

Beyond training and extension for farmers and UA micro-entrepreneurs it will be necessary to develop and increase capacities of:
a. Local stakeholders in urban agriculture (Municipal Departments, farmer organisations, NGO’s, research institutes, governmental organisations), for them to successfully engage in multi stakeholder processes for policy development and action planning, as well as implementation on urban agriculture (through organisation and implementation of a number of training activities well adapted to the needs of different types of stakeholders: policy awareness seminars; training courses on diagnosis, assessment and planning of UA; study visits; distance learning)
b. Extension and training institutes and trainers (through development of training modules and materials, training of trainers and activities oriented at integration of urban agriculture training in the institutional programme of the organisations involved and leverage of funding for longer term continuation of the training activities)

Finally, reinforcement of the learning processes at all levels through participatory monitoring and evaluation will be essential.

• For a more extensive introduction and review of literature on this subject please go to State of the Art Review
• Go to RUAF publications for an overview of RUAF publications on this topic (most of which are available online). You may also view the articles in the Urban Agriculture Magazine on this topic.
• Search the Bibliographic Database for other literature references, abstracts and online documents on this subject.