Blogs

Learning by doing is one of the most powerful educational approaches, both for adults and children. Kids observe what their parents and others in the community do, and they copy it.

As we walk to the Tres de Mayo school in Huayllacayán, in central Peru, which combines a kindergarten, primary and secondary school, we can see that activities on the playground have already started. Today is the final day of our filming trip in this community, and the school has planned the installation of a school garden: an activity they used to have prior to Covid and which they are now more than…

Smallholder, organic farmers in Bolivia struggle to sell their healthy, natural produce to an urban and peri-urban audience that is only slowly awakening to the health risks of food produced with agrochemicals.

While the weekly home delivery service is a new way to sell fresh produce directly to consumers, the age-proven, open-air markets offer a more obvious way to sell ecological food. As in much of the developing world, weekly neighbourhood markets are widespread in Bolivia, but they come with their own challenges when newcomers want to enter the scene.

The NGO Agrecol…

Towards the end of the dry season, many families across the African savannas have exhausted their reserves of stored cereal crops. Vegetables are hard to come by in local markets. Bush meat is one way for rural people to supplement their meagre diet with protein during the well-named lean or hunger season. This is why development organisations have struggled for decades to curb the destructive practice of setting the bush on fire to hunt small wildlife.

One option to ensure some food and income during the lean season is to grow cashew and mango trees. But with increased labour…

When you ask 5-year-old kids what they want to be when they grow up, many respond veterinarian, pilot, football player, ballerina, or firefighter, depending on where in the world you ask the question. Fortunately, some also say they want to become a farmer, as a young father in Bangalore told me his inspiring story on my recent trip to India.

Naresh N.K. works as a senior administration assistant at the University of Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology (TDU), a private university with a unique focus that I have never seen anywhere else in the world. TDU uses modern…

Even seemingly simple tasks, like raising the humble earthworm, can be done in more ways than one, however all variations must follow certain basic principles.

In a video from Bangladesh, villagers show the audience how to raise earthworms in cement rings, sunk into the soil. The floor is covered with a sheet of plastic to keep the worms from escaping. The worms are fed on chunks of banana corm and the ring is covered to keep out the rain, but still retain some moisture.

My grandfather used to raise worms in a pressed-board box on his back porch. He fed them on strips of…

From 14 to 22 February 2023, the Access Agriculture team, consisting of Executive Director Josephine Rodgers, Philippines Coordinator Danessa Lopega, and Honorary Ambassador for Asia Dr. Shaikh Tanveer Hossain, visited different organisations in the Philippines and explored partnerships for Access Agriculture's project in the country.

Access Agriculture will be working with several organisations in the Philippines to bring their resources of effective farmer-to-farmer training videos in appropriate local languages. This will help family farmers with few resources improve their…

Farmers are increasingly facing challenges relating to climate change. It is vital therefore to make them aware of good agricultural practices that can help them increase not only production, but also their resilience.

Having understood well such problems, Access Agriculture is working in Benin, West Africa, to provide rural actors with practical and relevant information on food production, processing and storage technologies, thanks to the smart projector made available to Access Agriculture young agricultural entrepreneurs, known as Entrepreneurs for Rural Access or ERAs.

Short food chains narrow the gap between producers and consumers, but when food is traded through wholesalers and when supermarkets sell their own brands, active efforts are undertaken to make farmers anonymous.

This never really occurred to me until Vera Kuijpers, from the organic farm and farm shop Het Eikelenhof in north-eastern Limburg, told me about her latest experience with Biofresh, one of the major organic wholesalers in Belgium.

Every Thursday at 4.30 am, Vera and her husband Johan Hons, load their van with their freshly harvested vegetables and other produce and…

The best way to educate consumers is right at the start, when they are school children.

In early 2021, Roxana Castellón, who works at Agrecol Andes, a Bolivian NGO, began approaching public schools around Cochabamba, asking the directors if they were interested in adding a new topic to their biology curriculum.

Some of them said “No, I have a fixed program I am supposed to follow.” But others agreed to let Roxana approach their biology teachers. Eighteen teachers, in different schools around Cochabamba, agreed to add some lessons on food and where it comes from. Much of…

Rosario Cadima is an enterprising farmer who spends two days a week buying and selling potatoes at the fair in Colomi, Cochabamba. Juan Almanza, who is an extensionist, had given her a DVD with a series of agricultural learning videos aimed at farmers like her.

The DVD included seven videos in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara on caring for the soil. One of the videos was about peanuts (groundnuts), which like other legumes, fixes nitrogen for the soil. Rosario recently watched the DVD with her parents, grandfather and other family members. They watched all of the videos over three…