# Getting Young People to Farm: How Effective Is Thailand's Young Smart Farmer Programme?
## 5 Discussion
### Impact of the Young Smart Farmer Programme  
It was surprising to find that the YSF programme implemented in the study area fell short of delivering two of its three desired outcomes, in that it neither increased participants' financial independence nor motivated participants to adopt innovative farming methods other than common machinery and chemicals. We found that participants and non-participants were alike in terms of net farm income and adoption of innovative farming methods. As a result, the programme may be less likely to reach its overall aim of incentivising young people to continue, return to, or enter farming and thereby provide a replacement for older farmers. This was also found by [PERSON] [43], who concluded that the programme weakly influenced agricultural students in Chachoengsao, Sa Kaew, Roi Et, and Sakhon Nakhon provinces in their agricultural career choices and interests in becoming full-time farmers. The explanations for the missing relationship between programme participation and increase in net farm income, which differed from the existing studies on similar programmes (e.g., [32; 44; 45]), may have been related to the problems of the programme's inputs, activities, and outputs, as discussed by participants (Table S9 in Supplementary Materials). First, the programme's activities still lacked continuity and excessively focused on theoretical knowledge and information transfer through training or meeting, with little practices and field trips and no additional relevant services and assistances (\(\sim\)17% of the problems discussed). These may not be enough support for participants whose farms are struggling for survival against challenges, such as water shortage, lack of infrastructure,smaller plots, narrow marketing channels, and encounters with disasters, as also described elsewhere [7; 17; 21; 46; 47]. Second, the same trainings and field trips were provided to all participants, regardless of their levels of farming knowledge, experience, farming activities, and products (~16% of the problems discussed). Third, the contents of the programme's trainings and field trips were still largely determined by the agency responsible for the programme, with little involvement by participants (~12% of the problems discussed). [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] [7] and [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] [21] also reflected on this problem that, under the bureaucracy, the agencies still primarily focused on implementing such programmes to achieve their own goals rather than the participants' goals. Fourth, as a result of the previous two problems, the contents of the trainings and field trips still do not fit participants' current farming purposes (~14% of the problems discussed), and therefore, they allowed participants to partially utilise the knowledge and information gained from the programme, as shown in Section 4.2. While some of participants who had just started farming set their first priority purposes of developing themselves into productive producers, they noticed that some of the knowledge transferred was instead aimed at developing them into modern entrepreneurs and vice versa. Last, some of participants were already satisfied with their farming practices and simple and peaceful lives and, therefore, had little incentive to attend all training and field trips provided (~11% of the problems discussed). Furthermore, although previous studies found a positive relationship between agricultural extension programmes participation and the adoption of novel farming technologies (e.g., [48; 49; 50]), our results did not indicate a similar conclusion. This may have been because of the two already mentioned problems. First, the technological knowledge and information participants gained from the programme were inconsistent with and inapplicable to the farming activities of some participants.