Blogs

In Ecuador, community organiser, Ing. Guadalupe Padilla, has told me that belonging to a group can help women gain leadership experience. Women become leaders as they work in a group, not in isolation. Guadalupe has helped to organise several such groups. Like a story, the group has to be about something. It has to have a purpose. And that purpose can easily be related to agriculture.

In Cotopaxi, Ecuador recently, while working with Paul and Marcella to film a video on women’s organisations, we met Juan Chillagana, vice-president of the parish (town) council. As an elected, local…

Kenyan schools recently moved away from memorising facts, and towards learning skills, knowledge and attitudes. This “competency-based curriculum (CBC)” includes new topics like ICT, and agriculture. Lawrence Njagi, the CEO of Mountain Top Educational Publishers, explained that the challenge was finding a way to integrate both subjects. He eventually decided that the best way was with videos from Access Agriculture.

In 2020, Mountain Top published a new textbook for fourth and fifth graders, to build students’ confidence step-by-step. The textbook lists URLs for almost 20 videos on…

In a refreshingly optimistic book, ‘The soil will save us’, Kristin Ohlson explains how agriculture could stop emitting carbon, and instead remove it from the air and place it in the soil.

Soil life is complex. A teaspoon of soil may harbour between one and seven billion living things. Microorganisms like fungi and bacteria give mineral nutrients to plants in exchange for carbon-rich sugars. Predatory protozoa and nematodes (worms) then eat the fungi and bacteria, releasing the nutrients from their bodies back to the soil.

Today, she is well known in Kenya and beyond for her successful organic business ‘Sylvia’s Basket,’, which she launched in 2016 in Limuru, central Kenya. But at heart, Sylvia Kuria remains the same young mother, who decided over 12 years ago to produce organic vegetables in her kitchen garden, so that her children could have safe and healthy food.

“I am now on a mission to share this knowledge, so that every mother on the African continent can feed her children food free from chemicals, food that will nourish and not harm, food that is safe and accessible,” Sylvia said. As a…

We are all familiar with organic milk, organic fruit and vegetables, or organic chocolate, but when one reads “Organic Sri Lanka”, one may have difficulty grasping what this really is about. For sure, it cannot mean that the entire country is organic. Or does it?

Indeed. As of April 2021, triggered by a wave of kidney diseases among its rice farmers, the Sri Lankan government took a brave decision to ban all imports of chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides, and to transition to organic and ecological farming.

Sri Lanka is an island country in South Asia. Political…

Agro-input dealers are often thought to be only interested in making money any way that is possible, otherwise known as “making a fast buck.” But enlightened dealers can combine the profit motive with a concern for customers’ well-being to earn their trust and make a business that lasts.

Richard Businge has a small shop in Fort Portal, Uganda, selling farm tools, seeds and other inputs. In 2016 Richard discovered that he could use Access Agriculture farmer training videos (www.accessagriculture.org…

According to the author Napoleon Hill, “all achievements, all earned riches, have their beginning in an idea.” Mori Goroubera, Head of ISADA Consulting in Benin, would certainly agree with this statement. His enterprise model was selected as one of the 25 best ideas in an Africa-wide competition in 2020 for innovation and digitalisation in agriculture, short value chains and agroecological transitions of food systems.  

The winners (designated ‘idea-carriers’ by the competition) were selected by a panel formed of the African Union and the European Union as part of the Long-term…

Supermarkets in the USA bulge with everything from strawberries to steak, but this generous supply is threatened by a destructive agro-industry. In the book Perilous Bounty, Tom Philpott outlines looming disasters in California and the Midwest.

The Central Valley of California produces an astounding 80% of the world’s almonds and half of the pistachios, besides a lot of the fresh fruits and vegetables eaten in the USA. This phenomenal production is irrigated with water that is mined, and can never be replaced. The Central Valley used to be a vast wetland. From 1930 to 1970 a…

In this age of restricted travel, when webinars have taken the place of conferences, at first, I missed face-to-face meetings a lot. But virtual events do allow one to get exposed to far more ideas than before. This is also the case when digital learning is introduced to farmers. Farmers are increasingly getting information online, like videos. But the videos have to be properly designed. Unlike following a cooking recipe on a YouTube video, in agriculture, recipes must be accompanied by basic principles, so that farmers can decide how to experiment with the new ideas.

I was…

Farmers and media practitioners – both need access to reliable sources of information to do their work well. Farmers must have appropriate information and opportunities to learn so that they can make better informed decisions to cope with daunting challenges, such as climate change. For this, they generally depend on media, especially in regions, where they do not have regular access to agricultural extension workers.

Media has an important role to play in informing vulnerable farming communities as well as consumers about climate change and its impacts and how they can adapt to…