The covid-19 pandemic has underscored the need for people to keep themselves healthy, emphasizing the role immunity plays in keeping away the infection. And the best way to boost our body’s defense is to eat healthy and nutrition rich food. This heightened the awareness about the need to better understand how the agriculture sector might promote nutrition on a worldwide scale as well as among governments and development organisations. Linking agricultural extension and advisory services (EAS) with participatory learning and action on nutrition and health, potentially improves the sustainability. Hence, there is a strong advocacy for integrating nutrition into extension advisory service to establish nutrition smart agriculture, a collection of agricultural and agro-processing technologies and methods developed using nutrition sensitive approach for the improvement of nutrition and productivity. This chapter provides a comprehensive overview of nutrition smart agricultural extension systems by examining its theoretical foundations, previous studies, policy landscapes, and practical implementations. The chapter identifies the practices promoted extension and advisory services, skills and capacity building activities necessary for incorporation of extension systems with nutrition. This chapter also examines potential that should be taken advantage of for the integration of nutrition into EAS and the difficulties faced by current EAS. The chapter delineates the global initiatives of nutrition smart extension systems as well as that of India. The chapter concludes with policy recommendations and best practices aimed at scaling up successful nutrition smart agricultural extension systems.

Keywords: Nutrition smart agriculture, Nutrition sensitive extension, Nutrition smart extension systems, Nutrition lead extension, Nutrition integrated extension, Food security