Background: In India, there are a large number of landless farmers who are taking up agricultural activities in leased lands. Often these farmers earn marginal revenue from their farming activity as bulk of the amount goes for repayment of lease amount. KVKs work as a knowledge resource centre for the benefit of farming community. One of the main mandates of KVK is to organise Front Line Demonstrations on various crops for quick dissemination of latest findings from agricultural research institutes to farmers’ fields. The feedbacks from the field in terms of production data and farmers opinion on technologies are given back to the institutes for further refinement of technologies. These FLDs are taken up at progressive farmers fields under the technical support of KVK scientists. But it has been noted that although the technology is being illustrated to farmers, they still do not strictly follow it and use some of their own ideas which may sometimes give poor result questioning the technology as the FLD is conducted in their filed. Hence the results generated are not always true and may get a negative effect.

    With this background, had taken up a pilot project in setting up an agriculture incubation centre at KVK, where the farmers will take up farming activities in KVK land as Front Line Demonstrations thereby utilising the land and expertise available at KVK under its direct supervision so that they gain confidence in starting their own farm. The project is aimed to make farmers LEAD, KVK farm and later their own, so the project is coined as LEAD [Lead Enthusiastic Agriculturist to Develop (LEAD) Farm] project. The main objectives of the project were: to setup agriculture incubation centre for enthusiastic farmers at KVK, to demonstrate and provide field level training to farmers on recent technologies in agriculture, to provide helping hand to landless farmers and agriculturist to take up scientific agriculture practices, to produce quality seeds and planting materials at KVK by farmers and to setup a seed bank at KVK.