In growing plantains and bananas, suckers are traditionally propagated by extracting them from one field to another. This method lends itself to two weaknesses:  Diseases and pests are spread easily in the process,  Large quantities of specific varieties of planting materials are not easy to acquire within short intervals. To surmount these two major hurdles of quality and quantity of planting materials in the production of banana/plantains, research has developed techniques to rapidly produce large quantities of pest and disease-free suckers called plantlets just within six months or so with high yielding potentials (they are hybrids). We train farmers to use the in-vivo horticultural techniques of propagation to avoid major loopholes inherent in the above two techniques. Specifically, we train farmers to use plants coming from stem bits (PIF) method to rapidly multiply plantain plantlets for field planting. This is the most widely used method and what NDEF is practising and advocating as best practice for farmers.