FAO trains 200 farmers as facilitators of farmer field schools
16 April 2021, Alto Molócuè (Zambézia) – When she first learned about PROMOVE Agribiz project, which was coming to her village of Mugema, Ilda Ernesto understood that she would get the opportunity to innovate in her agriculture activity.
Co-financed by the European Union, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), and the German Cooperation, and co-implemented by FAO, the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ), the Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) of the World Bank, and the Mozambique National Sustainable Development Fund (FNDS), PROMOVE Agribiz aims at promoting market-driven sustainable small-scale agriculture. The project focuses, among others, on the farmer field school (FFS) approach, in which farmers from a given community gather weekly to learn in a practical and experimental way food and cash crop management techniques and practices.
Ilda joined one FFS in Mugema and on Saturday (17.04.) she completes her training as FFS farmer facilitator. In total, FAO will train 196 farmer facilitators in a series of trainings until the beginning of May in the 10 districts of Nampula and Zambézia provinces, covered by PROMOVE Agribiz.
In this training, farmers learn production techniques and climate change adaptation practices, including the principles of conservation agriculture, diversified systems and polyculture. In the end, all of them receive a kit with inputs, among others seeds and fertilizer, to establish learning plots in their new FFS and facilitate the new learning cycle during the next cropping season.
At the end of this first training, Ilda recalls that the first practice disseminated in her former FFS which she adopted in her own field was row-seeding. But in the FFS, she also learned to "not burn grass or the remains of past crops, but to leave them there on the field, since they help improve soil quality". Mulching is one of the conservation agriculture principles and helps reduce erosion and improve the soil´s capacity to retain humidity. The result was obvious, the 37-year old mother of five says: "Production increased. I had full cobs, with complete grain lines."
Through a learning by doing approach, the FFS established within PROMOVE Agribiz focus on conservation agriculture and other production systems, which, according to Máximo Ochoa, FAO FFS Specialist and one of the trainers of Ilda´s and other 13 farmers´ from Alto Molócuè, throughout last week, is one of the most efficient ways to "prepare smallholder farmers to react to climate change, which the provinces of Nampula and Zambézia are exposed to, enhancing their fields´ and communities resilience".
Until the end of the project, 720 FFS are expected to be established with 18 000 smallholder farmers, of which 60% women like Ilda Ernesto, trained.