Social media, though many doubts exist on its use for sharing of information among farmers, is a
popular ICT tool that has great potential to be used for knowledge sharing and social networking among
farmers. In the 2018 case study of Thakur and Chander, the findings revealed that Facebook, WhatsApp and YouTube are now being used to share diverse farming-based information across India.

Using social media, information from different agricultural subsectors (crops, dairy, goat and poultry) and on different aspects of production, preventive management and marketing is now readily available and easy to share among farmers. YouTube, a popular online video-sharing platform, has become a good source of animal husbandry-based information as many videos were uploaded in different Indian languages. There was also an increase in viewership of videos in goat farming and in dairy farming.

Although the potential of social media is not yet fully exploited by agricultural extension and development departments to reach out to farmers in India. However, with recent actions taken by the Indian government, there is a possibility of enhancing social media use in agricultural extension and advisory services.

Read the full paper here.