Farmers' Research in Practice: Lessons from the Field - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1853393924 ISBN 13: 9781853393921

Verlag: Practical Action Publishing, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

Having established the central concepts of farmers' research, this book examines farmers' innovation through 17 wide-ranging case studies from around the world. It concludes by revisiting the major themes in relation to the lessons learned, and sets out the future issues and challenges for governmental and non-governmental organizations involved in agricultural development.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laurens van Veldhuizen has been a staff member of ETC since 1990. After joining ETC his main interest evolved into farmer participation in natural resource management, stakeholder interaction and local level institutional development and governance.

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Farmers' Research in Practice

Lessons from the Field

By Laurens van Veldhuizen, Ann Waters-Bayer, Ricardo Ramírez, Debra A Johnson, John Thompson

Practical Action Publishing Ltd

Copyright © 1997 ILEIA
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-85339-392-1

Contents

Introduction, 13, 
Grasping farmers research, 
1. Let's try it out and see how it works by Ueli Scheuermeier, 31, 
2. The craft of farming and experimentation by Arthur Stolzenbach, 39, 
3. Crazy but not mad by Henri Hocdé, 49, 
4. Innovative farmers in the Punjab by HS. Bajwa, G.S. Gill and 0.P Malhotra, 67, 
Adding technical options, 
5. Village–based cassava breeding in Tanzania by Dominick de Waul assisted by ER. Chinjinga, L Johansson, RE Kanju and N Nathaniels, 83, 
6. Extension through farmer experimentation in Sudan by Samia Osman Ishag, Omelnkaa Hassan Al Fakie, Mohamed Ahmed Adam, Yassir Mohamed Adam, Khalil Waggan Bremer and Mathias Mogge, 89, 
7. Moulding our own future by Chesha Wettasinha in collaboration with A. K Gunaratna and Padmini Vithana, 109, 
8. Starting with local knowledge in participatory research by Aresawum Mengesha and Martin Bull, 115, 
9. Tillage research challenges toolmakers in Kenya by David Mellis, Harriet Skinner Matsaert and Boniface Mwaniki, 127, 
10. Farmer research brigades in Zaire by Sylvain Mapatano Mulume, 139, 
11. Kuturaya: participatory research, innovation and extension by Jurgen Hagmann, Edward Chuma and Kudakwashe Murwira, 153, 
Improving experimental design, 
12. Why do farmers experiment with animal traction? by Henri Schmitz, Aquiles Simões and Christian Casellanet, 177, 
13. Empowering farmers to conduct experiments by Edward Ruddell, 199, 
14. Farmers' laboratory by Marius Broekema, Jan Diepenbroek and Luppo Diepenbroek, 209, 
Sustaining the process, 
15. Strengthening community capacity for sustainable agriculture by Peter Gubbels, 217, 
16. Supporting local farmer research committees by Jacqueline Ashby, Teresa García, Marma del Pilar Guerrero, Carlos Alberto Patiño, Carlos Arturo Quiroz and José Ignacio Roa, 245, 
17. Farmers' study groups in the Netherlands by Natasja Oerlemans, Jet Proost and Joost Rauwhorst, 263, 
Lessons and challenges for farmer–led experimentation, 279, 

CHAPTER 1

Let's try it out and see how it works

Ueli Scheuermeier

How do ideas happen? How does a farmer who is known for his or her innovations actually proceed? Is it in the same way the scientifically-trained researcher or extensionist has been taught to proceed: analyse the situation, define the problem, decide on the criteria for a good solution, set up a hypothesis for your trials, conduct the trials, analyse the results, check on the hypothesis, make an assessment? When I try to remember the times I have been in close contact with innovating fanners. I start to realize there might be aspects of creativity which we have not yet touched upon with our scientific procedures. What then can we learn from the way fanners go about exploring new ideas? Surely this ought to be highly relevant to the way in which participatory technology development is practised? Let us look, then, into some situations which I have experienced personally

Four anecdotes of innovative farmers

Sprinklers for tomatoes

Gom Bahadur Gaha was sitting in my office asking me whether I could help him get hold of a sprinkler or two. Now where on earth did he get this idea of sprinklers from? I knew him as a small farmer in the hills of Nepal, barely surviving with his family on the marginal and steep land where he has recently settled. Sprinklers were out of the question for him, since they had to be imported, and furthermore you need water pressure, which he was not going to have. This was just too high and costly a technology for his kind of situation, which we had analysed in our project.

Before telling him so I fortunately asked him where he had got the idea. "I have a relative a few hours walk away He is presently watering a sloping field full of tomato plants, and hopes to start selling tomatoes in three weeks time." Tomatoes, now, before the monsoon, on the Butwal market? Sounds like that farmer is going to make money I'm interested and we arrange a trip together to visit this relative of his. Sure enough, the same situation as Gom Bahadur's, only this farmer did not even have a single square foot of terraced and irrigated rice. He was a below-subsistence-level farmer, topping up his income with labour in the rice-fields down on the plains. But there was the sprinkler, tied to a stick which he stuck into different parts of his field every two hours or so. And a simple polythene pipe ran all the way up the hill, crossed two gullies wrapped round a thick wire, and ended finally in a tiny stream running down the mountain, some 300m of pipe in all. I was amazed. We started discussing how he got this all set up. "About 15 sprinklers were handed out to poor families by an NGO programme, but nobody really knew what to do with them", the farmer told me. "I asked my brother who accompanies trucks down to India what he could make out of it, and he showed me the trick with the pipe. Last year I made a small plot with some vegetables, and for the first time we had tomatoes and cucumbers before the rains. So this year I decided to plant this whole field with tomatoes. I know they will be harvested by the time the first rains come, so the field will be ready for the maize. I hope it works out nicely, because I have taken credit from the small-farmers' credit scheme to buy the pipe. If the tomatoes come out right, I'm sure we can sell them in Butwal. It is off-season now, and prices are high. My brother has found a shop in India where similar sprinklers can be had". And that is where Gom Bahadur immediately placed his order for a sprinkler. A year later it turned out that this particular farmer had repaid his credit to the savings scheme, plus the loans he had taken at tremendous costs from money-lenders, and had thereby put his family back into economic independence.

How could we have been so wrong in our assessments of the project? We had invested a lot of effort in analysing the situation of these farmers. We had established that their problem was the vicious circle of poor land, below-subsistence production, lack of cash, and seasonal migration of the men. We had checked this with some of them, and they had agreed. We were searching for solutions, a lot of the efforts going into giving the men opportunities to stay at home. The option of micro-irrigation with polythene pipes had actually also been looked into, but the costs and the risks were considered too high. Here I was with obvious proof of the opposite. Seasonal migration had even possibly been the most important impulse to making it work that brother working as a truck loader.

Ranching with Scottish Highlanders in the Alps

What's this? I had seen Scottish Highland cattle in photographs, but I had never seen these small, long-homed animals with their shaggy long red hair for real, and certainly not in an alpine pasture. Obviously only the bull was pure Scottish, the cows looked like the normal grey cows of the Alps, though a bit smaller, and there were a number of very healthy calves jumping about. But wait a minute, this doesn't look like milk production, does it? Good milking cows are the pride of every alpine farmer, and rightly so. But the farmer who had accompanied us to his herd...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Practical Action Publishing
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1997
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1853393924
• ISBN 13: 9781853393921
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Herausgeber: Veldhuizen Laurens Van, Waters-Bayer Ann, Ramirez Ramirez, Johnson Debra A., Thompson John
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar