A lecturer in Agricultural Engineering has stressed the need to strengthen the agricultural engineering content in the training of Agricultural Extension Officers. He also suggested that agricultural training institutions added programmes on soil and water engineering to boost the emerging policy to create many irrigated fields for all-year- round farming. Mr Alexander Twum of the Agricultural Engineering Department of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) was delivering a paper at the conference of the Association of Agriculture Engineers in Ho. He said it was crucial that Extension Officers, as front-liners of agricultural production, were conversant with the different plant and machinery in the field. The two-day conference was under the theme "Agricultural Engineering: The Way Forward for the Modernization of Agriculture in Ghana". He said while the educational institutions had been producing agricultural engineering professionals at all levels "we as a nation have not developed the political will to use their expertise to develop the nation's agriculture". In Mr Twum's view, agricultural engineering had made "very little" impact as "we continue to use the hoe and cutlass, and rely wholly on the rains for farming and a fair size of the little we have managed to produce go waste due to poor or non-existence of storage or processing facilities". He called on the association to assume a more assertive and aggressive stance to be recognized as belonging to a group of professionals whose role was important to winning the battle against hunger in the country. Source: GNA