Price Forecasting as a tool to aid Market-Led Extension

Extension has played a very important role in making India become self-reliant in food production. The main focus of extension agencies on production-oriented strategies made this possible. But the farmers at individual level are not realizing remunerative prices for their produce (Krishna et al., 2019). Therefore, extension services should be focused towards market-oriented strategies which will equip the farmers with necessary market information as well as will help them to obtain optimum return from their investment. The market-led extension would be of an effective instrument to protect the interest of the farming community (Krishna et al., 2019). Market-led extension is a new dimension of agricultural extension and this devises interventions for the farmers from planting to final market transaction (Shinogi et al., 2013). For successful implementation of this approach relevant and timely availability of price information is crucial. Many agencies are now disseminating current price information however very less focus is given to equip the farmers with forecasted price. Keeping this in background the present study is taken up to explore how this price forecasting techniques can help in protect the interest of the farmers and the roles of extension system. It was found that when price series of any agricultural commodity (here potato) is associated with high price volatility, GARCH model provide better forecast than ARIMA which is in line with the findings of several other authors. Extension system play very important role in light of price forecasting by not only disseminating forecasted price to farmers but also by capacity building of extension personnel and helping farmers in taking their marketing decision.