June 24, 2022
Mr. Mumba is producing more vegetables in his farm garden with conservation agriculture techniques than he was ever able to with traditional slash-and-burn practices. And he says his produce is healthier, larger and tastier, too. For 12,000 years, humans have added nutrients to soil through ashes derived from burned fields in order to grow food […]
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June 10, 2022
Joseph joined a Farmer Field School despite other men saying it was “a waste of time.” He ended up mulching a small piece of land just to please the staff. And then … “I never at all believed in this,” he admits, but his mulched maize remained green even when the rains stopped. When he […]
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April 13, 2022
Eddy says he tried many times to keep bees, but since he did not have much knowledge on the subject, he was never successful. He had participated in many of the sustainable farming activities promoted by local partner APIDEC, and knew that bees played an important role in the crop cycle. A chance to enroll […]
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April 1, 2022
Doing a comparison of traditional farming practices versus Conservation Agriculture on his own land has convinced Elijah that Conservation Agriculture is the real deal. Elijah, a single farmer in his early twenties, is a member of a farmer’s association. He says that, before he was trained on good agronomic practices, he farmed without any knowledge […]
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January 7, 2022
You’d have to search far and wide before finding a more determined farmer than Lucy. Since joining her village’s Farmer Field School, she has started implementing all the new practices she’s been exposed to thus far. These include establishing a multi-story kitchen garden, building a large outdoor dish rack to improve household sanitation, erecting a […]
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December 8, 2021
Local partner SEL often combines field visits or training sessions with “sharing meetings” to give participants a chance to express how their lives have changed, and for others to take note. A small sampling of the inspiring tales: — Tiganda said that she’d never been able to save money until she joined a Village Savings […]
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September 21, 2021
Until local partner ADIP offered training in soil conservation, Zacarías thought he’d learned everything there was to know about farming … and that it wasn’t getting any better. His parents had taught him traditional farming and he’d done what they’d shown him for many years. But then he started noticing that the land he inherited […]
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Monday, the chairman of one of the program’s farmers’ associations, says that, “Before [local partner] P.A.G. trained us in Conservation Agriculture we would go to our local markets and buy the Irish potato seeds that were available there. We would get low yields because we didn’t have the necessary knowledge or skills, and the quality […]
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June 28, 2021
In 2019, after years of poor farming results, Saweria experienced a complete crop failure because of a severe drought. In order to feed her three children, she says she resorted to stealing forest firewood to sell, risking hyena attacks and government sanctions. Less than a year into the start of this new program, she was […]
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February 5, 2021
When news of the COVID-19 pandemic was released in Zimbabwe, farmers and local partner staff initially panicked. Until more information was gathered about how the virus spread, the program suspended activities for about a month. But, just as elsewhere, people had to “keep on keepin’ on”, despite fears of getting sick. They faced multiple threats […]
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