 The Farmer Field School Manual is a well-crafted document which addresses national circumstances while adhering to the Food and Agriculture Organization's International Farmer Field School Principles and Guidelines. The revision of the manual forms part of Phase 3 of the European Union-funded program for capacity building related to multilateral environment agreements in African, Caribbean and Pacific countries which aims to promote environmental sustainability. National coordinator of the FAO's School Feeding Program, Cherian Smith, explains that a training session on the manual recently held for extension officers within the Ministry of Agriculture is expected to aid in the design and implementation of more efficient and impactful farmer-filled schools in the future. The last farmer-filled school manual was updated in 2006 and so we have gone ahead and updated it so we now have a 2022 version. That farmer-filled school manual, the whole point of that training today is for the extension officers to now go back in their regions and implement a farmer-filled school. So basically the farmer-filled school is a school where farmers meet and they undertake training for example in learning how to have a successful crop before the farmer-filled school was basically on integrated pest management but now we've included new and emerging topics like climate change is now a part of it, food safety is also a part of it. So it's a discovery-based learning approach that brings farmers together in a learning environment. According to Agricultural Extension Officer Jesharon Andrews, the updating of the manual and training will help the extension division promote ecosystem-based practices and approaches for agriculture as well as the sustainable use and conservation of biodiversity which ensures environmental sustainability while increasing productivity. Basically when we're done here today it would have allowed us to modify our approach to basically when we go back and execute that in our various regions. So like you would be aware we have different regions so I'm from region one and two and so within our area within the next year we hope to host a farmer-filled school where we bring in those farmers and whatever we would have discussed today we'll be able to modify and have the farmers to experience. Following this training a quarter of farmers will participate in a three-month farmer-filled school as efforts continue to increase the resilience of St Lucia's agriculture sector. From the communications unit of the Ministry of Agriculture I am Anisia Antoine reporting.