SEARCA: 2020 A Clear Agrivision For Tomorrow, Including Knowledge – Which Needs Clarifying

Today, Thursday, 05 December 2019, mid-morning SEARCA Director Glenn B Gregorio presented at the SEARCA Umali Auditorium a seminar titled (image above from his own Facebook sharing) "2020: A Clear Agrivision For Tomorrow." It is SEARCA's 11th Five-Year Plan – he is the 11th SEARCA Director. I love the pun: "2020: A Clear Agrivision." And indeed, what he presented is a clear vision.

From an ecopy that Mr Gregorio emailed me, I got the following sets of information:

SEARCA has reorganized or is reorganizing. So now it has these new departments:
Emerging Innovation for Growth Department;
Education & Collective Learning Department;
Research & Thought Leadership Department;
Applied Knowledge Resources Unit.

That is innovation!

And yes:

The resource units composed of Finance, Management Information Services, Human Resources, General Services, Facilities Management, and other emerging resources will support the lead units or service owners in providing products and services with the SEAMEO SEARCA brand of excellence.

I note: "SEARCA brand of excellence." And I agree. So far, based on the SEARCA publications that I have read, and that includes the one I am editing right now, on methodologies of research and development, R&D, in support of the United Nations' 17 sustainable goals – SEARCA has first-rate publications. I am referring to the books. Saying that, I stake my reputation as a technical editor of 4 decades of experience in agriculture and forestry. My credentials include the fact that I am the Editor in Chief of the Philippine Journal of Crop Science, PJCS, who made it ISI or world-class, an honor that the previous editors of 25 years failed to achieve for the PJCS.

I am very much interested in the Applied Knowledge Resources Unit – not to apply for a desk job but to help expand the concept.

Where will the knowledge to apply come from? In the Philippines, we already have these:
Pinoy Rice Knowledge Bank: https://www.pinoyrice.com;
IRRI Rice Knowledge Bank: www.knowledgebank.irri.org.

Thank you for those Knowledge Banks, people, but we need more than what you already have. And I am referring not to adequacy but accessibility: I mean:

Your Knowledge Banks are all technical in language.
What our users need are knowledge bits that they can bite!

Like:

Tillering capacity
Value chain

Those terms even a literate farmer cannot understand, so he cannot apply those knowledge sets from your Knowledge Bank, granting that he knows how to access them. If he gets them from a leaflet, brochure or guidebook, same story! It's the language that matters, not the piece of knowledge presented to the would-be user, who is a farmer and who may be hardly literate.

What is needed here is what I have in mind, and nobody else has conceptualized it or created a "Knowledge Bank" out of it. I call it:

The Knowledge Adviser.What it offers to the knowledge seeker is of 2 characteristics: non-technical terms and non-college language.

Like:

Yield ability – instead of "tillering capacity"
Income train – instead of "value chain."

The Knower must speak the language of the Unknower.
2020, here we come!@517