Living Farms What we do Ground level work

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.

In this section you can find a detailed summary of actions Living Farms is currently undertaking at grassroots level.

Conservation of seeds

We want to select, multiply, store and reuse local seed varieties. The seeds will be conserved both at individual farmers level as well as at community level.  

Improving productivity

Home gardens

We encourage farmers to start growing vegetables in home gardens. We choose strategic crops, like roots and tubers, because they grow easily without much water, labour or care and can be stored for a long time. Home gardens increase the period of growing vegetables from 3-4 months in a year to 8-9 months.

Common property resources

We assist rural communities to conserve and regenerate common property resources like grazing lands, ponds, riverbank areas, permanent fallows.... through group based management.

We provide public spaces of unused land for the poorest households with very marginal landholdings. They can use them to grow and maintain fodder and fuel for their farms.

Producing mixed crops

We make efforts to encourage the farmers to go back to producing mixed crops. This gives them a better chance to provide food continuously and it also keeps the soil fertile and clean. According to the specific agro-eco zones we select seeds and crops that are most suited to be grown there, so biodiversity can be restored.

Generating resources

Credit fund

We encourage small farmers to put their efforts together. As a collective they can get fair prices for their produces. A community credit fund will help them to meet food needs during scarce months and to initiate trading of collective produces.

Community food bank

We set up community food banks in each village to store locally-grown dry land cereals and pulses. The community will allocate food to the most vulnerable and hungry households, according to their own criteria of poverty and well-being.

Raising awareness

Training

We organise trainings on food processing, livelihood security, village specific problems, marketing and basic management principles. These trainings are given to few elected representatives of each village. 

Revive cultural habits in agriculture

We want to re establish local food and farming systems. We promote the use of millets and sorghums, as they are very nutritious and part of  their traditional food habits. We will organise a community solidarity festival after harvest, to restore the cultural habits of the tribes.

Transition from cash crops to food crops

We ask farmers in Orissa to think twice before starting to cultivate cash or GM crops. We inform them about negative side effects on human health and on the environment. We also explain them that they will become even more dependent by growing cash crops. If the market price for cash crops goes down, small farmers will have no income and as a disastrous result: no food. To achieve the transition from cash crops to food crops, we try to work in different steps (i.e. industrial cotton > biological cotton > food crops).

What are the expected results of all these activities?

• Production of diverse traditional food crops to maintain nutrition and health of the community.
• Improved food &  nutrition security
• Improved community autonomy over seeds
• Improved utilization of private and common fallows