Publications /  Annual Report 2001

Full marks for adaptability: Farmers reap multiple benefits from field schools The farmer field school began as a way of teaching Indonesian rice farmers how to reduce their pesticide applications. As the model has spread, its uses - and its benefits - have diversified

Bottom-up approach to learning It's eight o'clock on a fine tropical morning. Twenty farmers are stooping, crouching or down on all fours in a field of sweetpotato, their heads and necks craned at awkward angles as they peer at the plants. From time to time someone removes an insect or a damaged leaf and places it in a plastic bag, then makes a quick note on a scrap of paper. In half an hour or so, the group's facilitator will call the farmers back to the shade of a large tree. Here they will form small groups to compare notes and record their findings on large sheets of paper that will be used to make presentations to the others. After these presentations, every observation will be aired and sifted in a plenary session before the discussion moves on to the big question: what to do next in the field. Wait another week to see how the insect population develops? Or take action to control pests now ? The farmers will end their debate by making a collective decision. Then they will reassemble to discuss what constitutes good planting material and how it can help combat the pests and diseases that appear in the field. Finally, they will set up their own experiment to test their ideas before returning home to their farms. That was a day in the life of the farmer field school at Turi, a village in East Java. The farmers met in this way weekly, throughout the cropping cycle. After the harvest, they compared the yields they had achieved in their "learning field" with those of non-participating farmers on adjacent land. The field school concept was developed in the late 1980s by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as a way of introducing integrated pest management (IPM) to rice farmers. The idea was to achieve impact in a way that differed radically from top-down extension methods.

"Instead of telling farmers what to do, we design activities that enable them to observe, deduce and decide for themselves," says Elske Van de Fliert, an IPM specialist who worked on field schools with FAO before joining CIP in 1994.

This emphasis on discovery-based learning helps to ensure that farmers will internalize new knowledge and skills, empowering them to make better decisions on how to manage their crops. It also kindles a spirit of enquiry and collective action that lasts after the FFS has finished, helping farmers to meet new challenges as they emerge.

An evolving model

While the basic principles of the farmer field school have remained the same, their application has evolved over the past decade. CIP has been a part of that evolution.

The Center's involvement dates from 1995, when Van de Fliert and other members of CIP's Southeast Asian team began working with Indonesian partners to adapt the FFS model to integrated management of sweetpotato pests. To establish the necessary protocols, the scientists trained small teams of farmer researchers and development workers from NGOs to conduct a participatory assessment of farmers' IPM needs in four Javanese villages. But when the teams entered the villages, they found that the farmers were less concerned with pests and diseases than they were with the problems of marketing their crop. And whereas losses to even the most serious insect pests were generally low, there were huge variations in yields, mainly associated with crop management practices such as the use of fertilizers.

All this suggested a broader agenda than the IPM curriculum of the original project proposal. At community-level workshops in 1996, the partners decided to switch to an integrated crop management (ICM) framework. "The switch was the direct result of farmers' participation," notes Van de Fliert.

The next evolutionary step came when institutions in Vietnam decided to adapt the Indonesian model to their country's needs. In Vietnam, unlike Indonesia, the whole sweetpotato plant - vines and roots - is commonly used as animal feed. In a 1999 planning workshop, researchers, farmers and extension workers endorsed the ICM-FFS approach developed in Indonesia, noting that the broad curriculum and simultaneous emphasis on economics and ecology were particularly attractive.

In the 2001-02 pilot seasons they realized, however, that it would be beneficial to farmers to broaden the FFS curriculum to include utilization and processing aspects in addition to production. CIP and national partners had recently developed a new labor-saving technique for processing vines for pig feed, involving the use of fermentation instead of boiling. The technique was included in the new curriculum, providing a vehicle for its dissemination.

Meanwhile, CIP's Lima-based scientists had begun adapting farmer field schools for potato, starting with four pilot schools launched in collaboration with CARE in the Cajamarca area of Peru. This work was driven by two overlapping interests: to help farmers control late blight disease and to evaluate and disseminate new potatoes with resistance to the disease. To achieve these dual objectives, the scientists included various participatory research (PR) elements, forming a new model known as the PR-FFS.

"The idea was to generate a large data set that would be useful to scientists, and at the same time to try the new materials out with farmers," says Oscar Ortiz, the CIP social scientist who coordinated the project. "In conventional research, the baseline data used to formulate hypotheses are often collected from no more than two sites over a couple of growing seasons. When farmers conduct research in their own fields, in many locations, you get much more information at a lower cost."

The new model successfully met the project's combined research and extension objectives. Multi-locational trials within the PR-FFS showed that a number of new breeding lines performed outstandingly across locations, even under extreme disease pressure. Some of these lines have now been officially released as new varieties and others are spreading spontaneously, giving farmers much earlier access to them than if they had been evaluated through the formal research system. And as in Indonesia, broadening the project's initially narrow focus on pests to include other problems raised by farmers resulted in a set of priorities more sharply focused on their needs, as well as stronger farmer ownership of the FFS process.

Success with the four pilot schools in Peru sowed the seeds for a larger project linking six countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. As in Peru, the aim is to design and disseminate technologies and practices for the control of late blight. But a further aim has been built into the project proposal: to adapt FFS to suit local conditions in each country, in preparation for training farmers and scaling up the approach.

"This time we made adaptation an explicit goal," says Ortiz. "Our previous experience shows that there is no blueprint for a successful FFS and that the agenda needs to be left open, as in participatory research." Hence the different subset of problems being addressed alongside late blight in each country: seed management in Bangladesh, potato tuber moth in Bolivia, bacterial wilt in Uganda, to give but a few examples. All countries, however, are evaluating new resistant breeding lines, thereby laying a foundation for the same rapid dissemination as observed in Peru.

Broadening the agenda increases impact

At each stage of its evolution, the FFS has increased its impact by broadening its scope.

"One of the biggest benefits of the new FFS models is the boost they give to the dissemination of new technologies," says CIP economist Tom Walker. "Piggy-backing technologies on the FFS, such as new crop varieties or improved processing, can accelerate adoption." Experiences in Indonesia, Peru and Vietnam have been borne out by those of the recent six-country project, which has led to varietal releases in nearly every participating country.

Ortiz and his colleagues believe the sharing of skills and resources among institutions with distinct comparative advantages is another key to broadening the impact - and the reach - of the FFS. The six-country project takes its cue from previous CIP experiences, such as that with CARE in Peru, by inviting NGOs and extension services to participate alongside research institutes. In some countries, close relationships have been forged between institutions that had seldom worked together in the past. In Uganda, for example, the NGO Africare has developed a joint workplan with the National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO): Africare supports the fieldwork while NARO provides technical back-up, and the two are working together to write and test a field guide. In addition, the project builds on the experiences of other institutions in implementing not only FFS but also other forms of participatory research and development, such as village research committees. "The result is a fascinating process of cross-fertilization," says Ortiz. "We hope to combine the strengths of all the models."

Farmer participation in determining the FFS curriculum has also helped to extend its range, as well as its benefits, increasing both the immediate impact and the likelihood that farmers will take ownership of the learning process and so continue it afterwards. An evaluation of the sweetpotato FFS in Indonesia concluded that an FFS focused only on IPM would have had far less impact than the more broadly focused ICM-FFS, which raised farmers' incomes by up to 24 percent. Besides pests and natural enemies, farmers singled out seed health, field sanitation and nutrient management as areas in which they had improved their practices.

In Peru, where farmers also intervened to broaden the agenda, a workshop held after the project showed that farmers were keen to continue their learning process and to extend it even further to cover cereals, legumes and livestock. Participants in the six-country project have reported a similar extension of research activities carried out by farmers' groups, who have gained greatly in strength and confidence through the FFS experience.

This wide buy-in is paying off. "All of the countries involved in the six-country project have refined their methodologies and have published or will publish FFS field guides," reports Ortiz. "What's more, most partners have taken steps to institutionalize the method." There is also a good measure of spontaneous dissemination, which may lead to additional impact at the local level. For example, 68 percent of farmers participating in the pilot sweetpotato ICM-FFS in Indonesia said they had spread information on ICM to nearby non-participating farmers.

Scaling up: The challenge remains

Scaling up is the final challenge in delivering the multiple benefits of the new FFS models to farmers. It is also the hardest.

"As a resource-intensive model, the FFS is faced with the same scaling up problems as other participatory research and development approaches," says Walker. "Coverage is low, with only 20 or so farmers typically included in a group. And you may need two to three seasons with a group before the participants feel confident and knowledgeable enough to teach others. In this respect the very adaptability of the model works against it. The tendency to expand the curriculum to include all farmers' problems slows down the learning process even further."

Scaling up is likely to be even more difficult in diverse rainfed cropping systems than in the more uniform irrigated systems. Facilitators will find that the solutions that work in their own small patch of fields don't necessarily apply beyond the village boundaries. The multiple crops grown in rainfed systems could severely overburden the FFS curriculum. And there is usually only one cropping season a year, so schools cannot follow one another in quick succession as they can in the multiple cropping systems of irrigated areas. These considerations add weight to the argument that FFS should teach experimental skills and the basic principles of ecosystem management rather than specific technologies.

What can be done to speed up dissemination? Ortiz stresses that the foundation for expanded efforts must be more training. The FAO has trained NGO and governmental staff, initially in Southeast Asia and more recently in Africa and Latin America. In some countries, notably Indonesia and Vietnam, national programs have also played a lead role. For example, the pilot sweetpotato schools in Indonesia encouraged the country's Directorate of National Food Production to design a program to train a further 12,000 farmers. But numbers alone don't tell the whole story. "The quality of training is just as important as the quantity," says Ortiz. "And much depends on how faithful facilitators are to their training once they start implementing FFS independently."

The biggest impact from the FFS is still in the country where it all started, Indonesia. But the impact there isn't solely to do with a longer history of exposure. Other factors have played a part in creating what appears to have become a self-sustaining movement among farmers, in which the FFS is part of a broader agenda. These factors include the creation of a strong and dedicated national program on IPM, a receptive NGO movement and a supportive policy environment. According to Van de Fliert, around 40 percent of the FFS in the country are now organized and led by farmer-trainers, the first of whom participated in a two-week Training of Trainers course hosted by the national program.

As well as launching schools, the farmer-trainers hold seasonal technical meetings and training workshops. These forums have evolved into local, provincial and national farmers' organizations, whose agenda includes policy and institutional issues as well as technology development. Their activities vary from collective enterprises at the village level to nationwide congresses involving thousands of people.

It remains to be seen whether other countries can emulate Indonesia's success. If they can, millions of small-scale farming families across the developing world could soon reap the benefits of the FFS accrued to their food security and incomes, as well as to their health and environment.