For further information contact: Reinhardt Howeler

[Challenge] [Project Background] [Objectives] [Methodology]
[On-station Research] [FPR Pilot Sites]

Donor

The Nippon Foundation, Tokyo, Japan

Challenge

When grown on slopes, even those as gentle as 5%-10%, cassava crops can cause serious erosion, further degrading the soil.  Although several simple agronomic and soil conservation practices can counter declining fertility and soil erosion, most require additional labor or capital and, sometimes, take land out of production. For the farmer, short-term benefits are few. Consequently, farmers tend not to adopt these practices.

The real challenge, then, is to achieve adoption by developing a package of agronomic and soil conservation practices that are simple, well suited to the region’s socioeconomic and biophysical conditions, and beneficial to farmers in the short term. When farmers test alternative ways of improving the sustainability of their cropping systems through FPR erosion control trials, they can consider the various trade-offs between costs and benefits of each practice under their own conditions.

Project Background

In 1994, the NF sponsored a special project, to be implemented by CIAT, that would use an FPR methodology to test and develop the best practices for controlling erosion and maintaining soil fertility in cassava-based systems in Asia, in order to enhance the adoption of selected technologies.

The NF Project’s first phase (1994-1998) was conducted in China, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, in close collaboration with various research and extension organizations in those countries. The second phase (1999-2003) builds on the FPR methodologies developed in the first phase, and further develops FPE methodologies to disseminate and enhance adoption of the best farmer-selected practices. The second phase is being implemented by CIAT in collaboration with five research organizations in Thailand, six in Vietnam, and three in China.

Objectives

The Project aims to develop and disseminate, through the use of a farmer participatory approach, efficient and effective integrated crop and soil management practices that optimize farm productivity and contribute to the sustainability of cassava-based cropping systems.

Methodology

To develop improved technologies, the Project follows the basic idea described under Farmer participatory research, whereby farmers make their own decisions, based on the results of trials that they or fellow farmers in their area conduct in their own fields. Researchers and extension workers facilitate this process in any of many different ways, depending on local circumstances. The steps the Project usually followed were:

• Conduct rapid rural appraisals (RRAs) in those villages where cassava is an important crop and grown on slopes with serious erosion problems. In each village, facilitators work with farmers to diagnose major problems and discuss possible solutions.
• From the results of these RRAs, the most suitable pilot sites (i.e., villages) are selected for the Project, starting with only one or two sites and expanding to others later.
• Researchers establish demonstration plots on an experiment station or in a nearby farmer’s field. These plots show an array of treatments from which farmers choose what they consider as the most promising. For erosion control trials, plots are laid out exactly along the contour of a uniform slope. Plastic-covered ditches along the lower end of each plot allow measurement of soil losses through erosion, as described under Erosion Control. The same simple methodology is also used for FPR erosion control trials.
• Farmers from a selected pilot site visit the demonstration plots, observe and discuss the various treatments, which they score on a scale of 1 to 3. After a general discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the various treatments, the group as a whole selects the three or four most suitable practices for testing in their own village.
• Back home, the group decides who of the farmers will conduct what type of trials and with what treatments, always including their traditional practices as one treatment for comparison. Most FPR trials have four or five treatments without replicates. Besides FPR erosion control trials, farmers usually want to conduct trials on other technologies, such as new varieties, fertilizer applications, intercropping, and weed control.
• Facilitators assist the farmers in laying out the trials and establishing the treatments.  Once established, the farmers maintain the trials, but the facilitators visit regularly to discuss progress and solve problems where necessary. In the case of erosion control trials, the facilitators may come once or twice during the growth cycle to help farmers collect and weigh the sediments in the plastic-covered ditches and take samples of eroded soil for moisture determination.
• At harvest, a field day is organized for participating and non-participating farmers, including farmers and extension workers from neighboring villages. Farmers and invited officials visit all the trials, which had been partially harvested early that same day with the harvested roots and results shown for each plot. Again, each farmer scores each treatment according to his or her own criteria. During a final meeting, the average results of all the trials are shown and discussed, including the data on gross income, production costs, and net income obtained for each treatment. Armed with this information, farmers vote on the best treatments. They may decide to either test them again in the following year, or start implementing promising treatments on larger areas of their production fields.
• Once promising practices have been identified, farmers will try to adopt those for their own fields. The facilitators encourage adoption by supplying planting materials of new varieties or crops and certain inputs that may not yet be locally available. If farmers want to plant contour hedgerows to control erosion, the facilitators may have to teach them how to set out contour lines and provide the initial seed or planting material for the hedgerows.
• The improved practices can then be disseminated to other farmers or to other communities through various FPE activities, such as cross-visits, field days, training courses, distribution of extension pamphlets and posters, and setting up of community-based self-help groups as described under Farmer Participatory Extension.

On-station Research

The Project also initiated or continued some strategic and applied research on-station to identify new options or solve certain problems that were identified during the course of conducting FPR trials. These have been described under On-station Research.

FPR Pilot Sites

Initially, the Project worked in only two sites in each of four countries: China, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Once the methodology had been developed, people had been trained, and everyone felt comfortable with the farmer participatory approach, the number of pilot sites expanded rapidly to reach and benefit more farmers. In 2001, the Project was working in 20 pilot sites in Thailand, 21 in Vietnam, and 9 in China, as indicated in the map below. Such expansion is likely to continue.