What we do
What we do
Living Farms is committed to protect peoples right to food, land & farming. We want to achieve this goal in a sustainable way. In this section you can discover our working methods, projects and campaigns.
Ground level work
We intend to be co-travellers on the road to food sovereignty. We want to reach this objective by participatory exercises with local farmers. Living Farms doesn't want to become a full scale implementing organisation. We prefer to focus on a few selected villages to try out a set of principles. If the results are good, we establish a model and let others (communities, NGO's or government) upscale this. This way we want to bring tangible changes in poor peoples lives.
Our projects at grassroots level.
- Community food sovereignty project - Dongria Kondh
- No to the silent killer - Pesticides (as part of the CPAM campaign)
- Alternative model for Bt Cotton (as part of the campaign against GMO's)
- Helping communities to develop sustainable assets to improve their livelihoods
Information and documentation
The Living Farms information and documentation centre conserves indigenous technology and knowledge of the local food and farming system.
Documentation centre
To make the efforts of our fieldwork last, we document our experiences and results. It is important to write down traditional knowledge, otherwise it will be lost. We want to share this with farmers, organisations, scientists, academics... to help raise questions.
Advocacy and campaigns
Living Farms wants to create a network of informed and critical citizens. We raise their awareness and give information on safe and healthy food through different campaigns.
Regularly we gather petitions against the use of genetically engineered crops and pesticides. We ask people to sign these petitions and hand them over to the government of Orissa.
We also want to inform the media and people in the corridors of power, so they can become watchdogs in favour of the poor and marginalized farmers' situation.
We want to make clear that we are not against development and industry in general. But the core question we always like to ask is: “who's prosperity will be promoted?” We want to take care of the earth and improve the wellbeing of all people, not only the proft of a few giant companies.
Our campaigns :
Networking
We are passionate to learn and eager to share our knowledge with others. We work together with NGO's, farmer organisations, academics, media, politicians, health workers, environmentalists... We are convinced that the success of any organisation or project depends on healthy relations among various institutes and organisations. These linkages can be helpful to succeed where we cannot do it alone.
Living Farms gives trainings for professionals, organisations or farmers. Please contact us if you want our help to organise a training or workshop on one of the following topics.
- nutrion garden
- conservation of seeds, vegetables, millets, paddy
- mixed farming system
- millets based farming system
- problem diagnose
- non-pesticide management
