One of the key reasons why PG members are loyal to selling their commodities to COMACO is the program’s community out-reach service by trained extension staff who offer improved ways to promote food security, diversify income, and mitigate against the effects of climate extremes and other social and health challenges.   Much of this training is conducted in the limited months of the dry season (June-November) when families are freer to participate and road access allows such activities.  Though the primary focus of this training is oriented toward agriculture and related market benefits, increasingly, COMACO has begun offering new skills that broaden local understanding on how to invest improved incomes in safer livelihoods without depleting local natural resources. 

Field day events are oriented around community depots, which are generally located in a central location within the community and provide basic administrative and infrastructure support for these events.  COMACO’s vision is to continue field days as a primary facilitative process for introducing and reinforcing livelihood-related subjects relevant to the communities and resource management needs where COMACO operates.  In attendance at these field days are PG lead farmers.  Through these field days, these people are tasked to disseminate and share their new knowledge with fellow-group members when they return to their respective villages.   As these field days become a more customary way of life in a “COMACO” community and as PG cooperative leaders become better able to organize them, COMACO will continue to facilitate their role for encouraging continued links and synergies between markets, agriculture and conservation to further support a better standard of living.

Another method of ongoing learning is the Demonstration Farm. Each regional CTC, through their respective extension program, maintains demonstration sites to help promote successful adoption and understanding of recommended production practices.   This is done in partnership with selected PGs and with sufficient freedom of design to ensure such sites meet the needs of local producers, while also facilitating training efforts by COMACO extension staff.  In some cases, such demonstration sites might be nothing more than best practices carried on selected field plots and used for training of new PG members.  In other cases, demonstration sites might have more oversight by extension staff to ensure recommended practices are followed according to new techniques being introduced into the area, such as how to intercrop with agro-forestry species or how to space and maintain a successful apiary.  In 2009, COMACO worked with PGs to identify and recognize top farm plots to encourage farmer visits to these sites to promote continued adoption of best practices.