Bridgette Williams says it was a shock to her parents when she suddenly abandoned plans to study business at university and opted instead to read for her degree in agriculture.

Williams had no previous interest in agriculture. But in 1997, she, along with three classmates, left her school home of Wolmer's Girls' School on Marescaux Road, Kingston, to go to Merl Grove High School on Constant Spring Road, St Andrew, for a career talk.

The lecture turned out to be the seed of her agricultural interest, which has since grown to become a powerful tree.

Williams enrolled at the College of Agriculture, Science and Education (CASE) in Portland where she earned an associate degree in general agriculture.

She has had the distinction of being crowned National Farm Queen and Clarendon Farm Queen in 2001.

Today, she is the training manager at the Rural Agricultural Development Authority where she is seeking to get farmers to incorporate greater use of technology in farming.

Having found out through research that low agricultural productivity is linked to the resistance of farmers to new technologies, Williams has embarked on an ambitious plan to change the way in which farmers go about their daily lives.

A major challenge, however, is a firewall to information and extension officers that has been mounted by some farmers. Williams told The Gleaner that her research found that only about 15 to 20 per cent of older farmers utilised information from extension officers. Most of them, she said, got information from their peers, or preferred to continue the techniques they had learnt from their fathers and grandfathers.

She said one of the greatest challenges is the perception of some older farmers who believe "young people don't know much".

Williams said she had begun to tweak training tools and courses to include modern teaching metho-dologies. Her ambition is to begin working on a PhD in agricultural- extension methodologies.

It is, she explained, an area that would allow for the development of strategies that would help extension officers and specialists to improve the rates of acceptance and use of technologies among the traditional farmers.



 Gleaner.com