AgriTalk gets international spotlight as the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) recognized it as one of the Best Community Service programs in the Asian Media Awards 2021, along with three other media companies in Asia.
This program, being implemented by the Agricultural Training Institute (ATI) in partnership with the Manila Bulletin’s Agriculture Magazine, started in 2017 initially as a series of free seminars promoting urban agriculture and featuring agribusiness success stories.
As the pandemic hit in 2020, AgriTalk has been transformed into a series of webinars streamed via the ATI’s Facebook and YouTube accounts. Regional AgriTalks were also launched by the ATI regional training centers thru web and teleradyo platforms.
Specifically, the program offered discussions and actual demonstrations on urban gardening, production technologies of various commodities, processing, and agripreneurship.
This has been part of the Institute’s urban agriculture initiative under the “Plant, Plant, Plant” Program to expand and sustain the interest of the public in growing their own food especially amid the global pandemic.
Each episode has reached over 2,500 real-time views on Facebook, and an average of more than 1,500 engagements.
Resource speakers during these webinars were composed of cooperators from selected ATI Learning Sites nationwide and other partners of the Institute from private organizations as well as state universities and colleges.
This undertaking is also being supported by the Smart Communications, Inc.
In 2019, the AgriTalk has, likewise, received a bronze award from the Media Specialists Association of the Philippines during the Innovation, Creativity, and Effectiveness Awards for the Activation category.