Assignment - Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Extension Agent

This comes directly from the Peace Corps as to what I will be doing:

"As extension agents, Urban/Peri-urban Agriculture Volunteers provide a valuable service to the urban community, which lacks information and materials for increasing or engaging in urban agricultural production. Urban Agriculture Volunteers promote the transfer of appropriate skills and technology through demonstration, while living in the cities and speaking the local languages of the farmers. Emphasis is on qualitative rather than quantitative results, meaning you will be working with relatively fewer farmers than past generations of Volunteers. This emphasis enhances your ability to get to know a few communities, and a few people within each of those communities, very well.

Peace Corps Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Volunteers are assigned primarily to Senegal's Horticulture Directorate within the Ministry of Agriculture. As a member of a Peace Corps project team, you will be responsible, along with your host-country and Volunteer counterparts, for participating actively in the creation of work plans for your city and for yourself, monitoring and expanding on the work of previous Volunteers, and maintaining a documentation system for your Urban/Peri-urban zone that includes reports, recording baseline information, and other documents. You will be required to attend monthly planning meetings with the other volunteers in your region and to work in close collaboration with your colleagues.

Peace Corps/Senegal's program philosophy is based on an approach which emphasizes demonstration, extension, and the exchange of ideas. Depending on the conditions in the city, the ecology and farming system of your urban/peri-urban area of assignment, you can expect to be working on many of the following activities:

-Increasing city and suburban production of vegetables, flowers, herbs or field crops by promoting the usage of appropriate, improved variety seed and associated agricultural practices.

-Protecting vegetable, flowers, herbs or field crop production areas from insect and pest damage, through the promotion of sustainable agricultural means, such as Integrated Pest Management.

-Increasing soil fertility through the promotion of sustainable organic means, such as composting, manure tea, etc.

-Protecting the vegetables, flowers, herbs and crop production areas from animal and wind damage through the promotion of sustainable agricultural means, such as live fencing and windbreaks.

-Increasing the production of market-quality vegetables, flowers and herbs for sale and home consumption.

-Develop individual and organizational capacities at the city level.

-Promoting improved seed selection, storage and handling techniques

Your main responsibility is to initiate and develop a process aimed at empowering urban and peri-urban farmers to use appropriate technologies to increase agricultural production. The process encompasses roughly the following steps:

1. Assessment of the agricultural sector in your work zone
2. Set up an action plan
3. Implement sustainable production activity
4. Evaluation
5. Project Reporting"

Despite the fact that I know very little, really nothing about farming and agriculture, I am looking forward to doing this. I hope and am sure that I will have adequate training in what I am going to be doing, if not, the people of Senegal could have one grave few years.