Supply Chain of Agriculture Extension Agent Quality

Introduction

Farmer productivity should be maintained or increased to meet growing human needs as it is needed to support the availability of food, which is a concern throughout the world today, especially because most of the agricultural land has been converted into housing or offices. Increasing farmer productivity is so important that this has become a worldwide concern; for example, the United Nations formed a special agency named the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) specifically to improve nutrition and living standards, increasing agricultural productivity, improving the lives of rural communities, and supporting international economic growth. This organization also assists developing countries to improve the ability of their agricultural extension workers to help farmers increase their productivity.

Many studies have discussed the productivity of farmers, but most of them have been seen in terms of agricultural technology, intensification, and extensification, although they are still lacking in terms of improving the quality of agricultural, human resources. The Work Bank, for example, highlights a lot about the sustainability of funding of agricultural extension workers in the world to provide farmers’ needs for knowledge and other resources (Davis & Place, 2003; Feder et al., 2001; Muyanga & Jayne, 2006). The next steps that can be done to improve farmers’ productivity are by improving agricultural extension agents and agricultural production, increasing income of rural communities, and agricultural extension reform strategies in rural development (Waithaka, 2001).

Since empirical studies on the quality of agricultural extension agents and their relationship with farmers’ soft skills competence, teamwork, and productivity are still lacking, the references that support this study were very limited. For the quality of agricultural agents, the researchers have used the agricultural extension agent’s achievements of short-term goals as references (Vintarno et al., 2019), assuming that an agricultural extension agent that is able to achieve at least the short-term goals is a qualified agricultural extension agent (Ammani et al., 2010; Solís & Bravo-Ureta, 2005). Next, the researcher builds an assumption based on several references explained in the literature, that the quality of agricultural extension agents affecting the farmers’ soft skills, especially competencies and cooperation (Banker et al., 1996). By achieving both competence and good cooperation, the researchers assume that the productivity of farmers will increase.

Where the results of this study can be used to assess farmer productivity in terms of extension agent quality, soft skill competence, and teamwork, this study, based on the phenomena that have been described, aims to analyze the relationship between agriculture extension agent quality with farmers’ soft skills competence, teamwork, and their impact on increasing farmers’ productivity from the perspective of extension agents. Further, this paper tries to fill the gap of the empirical studies that examine the productivity of farmers by improving the quality of agricultural human resources. Therefore, this research can make a significant contribution to fill these shortcomings.