Vea la versión en español a continuación
Villagers the world over are buying smart phones, getting on line and eagerly using and sharing information electronically. It might seem like print is going out of fashion, but paper can still be an important medium.
I recently took part in an information fair for farmers in the village of Carrillo, Cotopaxi, in highland Ecuador. Along with colleagues, I was visiting the NGO EkoRural, which has worked for years with the farmers in this land of perpetual springtime.
Such visits can turn into a performance, where the farmers put on shows for their guests. It’s always interesting, but it can be hard to tell how much of the information came from the farmers and how much was prompted by their well-meaning extensionists. This time, EkoRural turned the idea around. We visitors were given a small space to show posters and demonstrations to the local farmers, who would rotate through our stands in eight groups of 25 people.
I set up shop in a village schoolroom. I used my 15-minute time slot to show each group a farmer-to-farmer video from Bolivia. The time limit was too short to discuss the videos with my audience. So I wrote a factsheet, telling them how to log onto www.accessagriculture.org, and download more videos for free.
At least some people read the factsheets carefully and my idea seemed to be working. But I didn’t realize how much my audience wanted the factsheets until I ran out of them. I had underestimated the turnout for the event. As I handed out the last copy of the fact sheet, I turned to apologize to one farmer who still had her hand out. She gave me a piercing look of total disappointment.
Then another man stepped in. “Don’t you have your original left? I can get it photocopied,” he said helpfully.
Problem solved, or so I thought. I gave him the original I brought from Bolivia and waited for my new friend to return with the photocopies. I never saw him or the factsheet again. At least he got the information he wanted. Even in this digital age, print is still popular. It also has some advantages: it is cheap, permanent and always available to read, as my vanishing new friend will surely agree.
Watch the videos
Living windbreaks to protect the soil
Forecasting the weather with an app
Further reading
Access Agriculture publishes a fact sheet for each of its videos. The fact sheets have been popular with video viewers. In a recent on-line survey, 31% of respondents said they downloaded them.
See also:
Bentley, Jeffery W. and Eric Boa 2013 The snowman outline: fact sheets by extensionists for farmers. Development in Practice.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to EkoRural for organizing our trip to Carrillo, generously supported by the McKnight Foundation.
LA HOJA VOLANTE DESAPARECIDA
La gente rural de todo el mundo está comprando telĂ©fonos inteligentes, conectándose al Internet y usando y compartiendo informaciĂłn electrĂłnicamente. Puede parecer que los impresos están pasando de moda, pero el papel todavĂa sirve.
Hace poco participĂ© en un dĂa de campo para compartir con agricultores en la comunidad de Carrillo, Cotopaxi, en los Altos Andes de Ecuador. Junto con mis colegas, visitaba la ONG EkoRural, que ha trabajado durante años con los agricultores en esta tierra de la eterna primavera.
Estas visitas pueden convertirse en todo un show, donde los agricultores presentan espectáculos para sus invitados. Siempre es interesante, pero puede ser difĂcil saber cuánta informaciĂłn proviene de los agricultores y cuánta es motivada por sus bien intencionados extensionistas. Esta vez, EkoRural dio un giro a la idea. A los visitantes se nos dio un pequeño espacio para mostrar carteles y demostraciones a los agricultores locales, quienes rotaban por nuestros stands en ocho grupos de 25 personas.
Me instalĂ© en una escuela del pueblo. UsĂ© mis 15 minutos para mostrar a cada grupo un video de agricultor-a-agricultor de Bolivia. El lĂmite de tiempo no me dejaba discutir los videos con mi audiencia. AsĂ que escribĂ una hoja volante, explicándoles cĂłmo entrar en www.accessagriculture.org, y descargar más videos gratis.
Varias personas leyeron las hojas volantes cuidadosamente y mi idea parecĂa funcionar. Pero cuando mis hojas volantes se acababan mi di cuenta que la gente las querĂa de verdad. Yo habĂa subestimado la participaciĂłn en el evento. Mientras repartĂa el Ăşltimo ejemplar de las hojas volantes, di la vuelta para disculparme con una campesina que todavĂa extendĂa su mano. Me mirĂł con una mirada penetrante de total decepciĂłn.
Entonces otro hombre intervino. “ÂżNo tienes tu copia original? Puedo fotocopiarla”, dijo amablemente.
Problema resuelto, o eso creĂa. Le di el original que traje de Bolivia y esperĂ© a que mi nuevo amigo volviera con las fotocopias. Nunca lo volvĂ a ver ni a Ă©l ni a la hoja volante. Al menos Ă©l obtuvo la informaciĂłn que querĂa. Incluso en esta era digital, el material impreso sigue siendo popular. Tiene algunas ventajas: es barato, permanente y siempre disponible para leer, como seguramente estará de acuerdo mi nuevo amigo que se hizo humo.
Ver los videos
Barreras vivas para proteger el suelo
Pronosticar el clima con una aplicaciĂłn
Lectura adicional
Access Agriculture publica una hoja volante para cada uno de sus vĂdeos. Las hojas volantes han sido muy populares entre los espectadores de vĂdeo. En una reciente encuesta en lĂnea, el 31% de los encuestados dijeron que los habĂan descargado.
Bentley, Jeffery W. and Eric Boa 2013 The snowman outline: fact sheets by extensionists for farmers. Development in Practice.
Agradecimientos
Gracias a EkoRural por organizar nuestro viaje a Carrillo, generosamente apoyado por la FundaciĂłn McKnight.
A gift of music
Marcella Vrolijks, who films and edits the Agro-Insight videos, has an ear for music. She starts and ends each video with a few riffs of music from the country where it was filmed. She has a gift for making the music fit the action. In one video where people in Mali are planting millet, Marcella added a West African beat that matched the rhythms of the hoes and hands so perfectly that others have asked if the music was playing while the farmers were being filmed. Another time, in Togo, the farmers themselves had composed a song about mucuna (velvet bean) and Marcelle starts the video with the women performing their own tune.
So, when Marcella and Paul came to film in Bolivia late last year, I took them to see something I knew they would appreciate – the Musical Instrument Museum in La Paz. There we met Ernesto Cavour, who is often called the greatest charango player in the world. A small stringed instrument with a curved body, the charango was originally made from armadillo shells. Nowadays they’re usually carved from wood.
Don Ernesto will be 80 next year. He grew up fascinated by the music created by campesinos playing their charangos. Don Ernesto taught himself to play the charango, formed a band and toured Europe, North America and Japan while he was still quite young. He loved every performance, but he came back to Bolivia to play and to teach people about music. He bought a house on Calle Jaén, a narrow cobblestone street in the old town of La Paz which is only accessible on foot. Here he publishes books about music and displays the traditional musical instruments of Bolivia in the museum he made. Don Ernesto is not only a scholar and player of the charango but an inventor too. He has created 30 new instruments, including the muyu-muyu, a charango which is strung on both sides of the body, giving an extended tonal range.
At the museum, we heard don Ernesto play with his daughter, Kantuta Cavour, and fellow musicians. Their musical style ranged from traditional Andean tunes, to those that incorporated representations of bird song, animal noises and the sound of rain made by instruments or the inventos created by don Ernesto.
Later we asked Kantuta if we could use their music for a small set of farmer educational videos. She thought her father would like the idea, and he readily agreed.
Marcella painstakingly reviewed dozens of don Ernesto’s songs to weave the music into the videos. Two of the videos were about weather, and Marcella was able to blend some of the musical rain with shots of storm clouds. I often think of the Cavours’ generosity. Their respect for tradition and love of innovation mirror our own ideals at Agro-Insight for an agriculture that creatively blends the old and the new.
Watch the videos
The planting video (Grow row by row)
Living windbreaks to protect the soil
Forecasting the weather with an app
Visit the Music Museum
Museo de Instrumentos Musicales de Bolivia
Additional reading
Los Tiempos 2019 “Ernesto Cavour” Revista Oh! No. 1046 (16 July) pp 2-3.
Diseases need to be cured; this is true for people, animals and plants. In plant protection, fungicides are probably more readily seen as acceptable than insecticides, which are well known to harm the ecosystem, bees, birds and people. But plants can be protected without chemicals, as people from the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in India are showing in their gradually growing series of farmer training videos.
Their latest farmer training video on root and stem rot in groundnut nicely shows how beneficial fungi like Trichoderma can control root and stem rot diseases without the need for chemical fungicides. Indian farmer Govindammal shows the viewer how she carefully coats the groundnut seed with Trichoderma, using some water to make the powder stick to the seed. She mixes it on a jute bag without using her hands, to avoid breaking the seed.
Some farmers add Trichoderma directly to the soil by mixing it in the manure. For one hectare of land, they mix two kilograms of Trichoderma with 10 baskets of farmyard manure. They leave the mix for a day in the shade before applying it to the field. The good fungi will grow faster with the manure. By broadcasting this mix on their field before sowing, farmers will grow abundant, healthy groundnuts.
Biological pest control was long restricted to insects, so when doing a Google Scholar search on root and stem rot in groundnut, I was pleasantly surprised to see that many top articles are on biological control with beneficial fungi such as Trichoderma. Indian scientists have dominated this research and hence it comes as no surprise that in India Trichoderma has become widely available as a commercial product.
Apart from their own videos, MSSRF staff have also translated farmer-to-farmer training videos that were produced in Bangladesh and Africa. MSSRF makes the Tamil versions of the videos available to farmers through its rural plant clinics and farmer learning centres.
In an earlier blog, Jeff wrote that “Extension agents can and do make a difference in farmers’ attitudes about agrochemicals, even if it takes time.” This is true, but videos can speed up this process. Besides, quality training videos will not only change the behaviour of farmers, but also extension staff, and some researchers.
Hopefully in future, we will see more research and extension in support of organic agriculture and more organic technologies will become available to farmers. As we have seen with other technologies such as drip irrigation (read: To drip or not to drip), farmer training videos can create a real demand for green technologies and trigger rural entrepreneurs to invest in them.
Watch or download the videos from the Access Agriculture video platform in English, French or Tamil
Managing mealybugs in vegetables
Managing tomato leaf curl virus
Managing bacterial leaf blight in rice
Managing aphids in beans and vegetables
Root and stem rot in groundnut (will be published in coming week)
Related blogs
I recently showed a Kenyan video about hand milking to a group of women dairy farmers in Bolivia. They laughed when Peter Ndung’u Macharia, a farmer who appears in the video, said that he sometimes sang to his cows.
I wondered why the Bolivian women laughed. People laugh for many reasons. They may find humor when they see the familiar in an unexpected context, or they can laugh at a strange idea. So, later I asked the extensionist, who was also watching the video: “Do dairy farmers here sing to their cows?”
“I wished they would sing to their cows. They argue in front of their cows, husband and wife yelling at each other, or at their kids. Sometimes they hit the cow, or they milk with all that anger inside of them, making the cow nervous.”
Access Agriculture videos are meant to be a learning experience, and serious, but it may add interest if the audience finds some unintended humor. The extensionist said that the video was excellent, and that he hoped that people here would adopt a softer touch, such as singing, instead of just corralling a cow and jerking on her unwashed teats.
After all, music is used fairly widely to calm cows – from classical concertos to Simon and Garfunkel (look up “music to soothe dairy cows”). Cows are living beings and making them comfortable during milking can only help to produce quality milk. And never argue in front of them.
Watch the video
Humanity may be on the verge of a scary new world where antibiotics no longer work. An infected wound, for example from a scratch on a rusty nail, could be potentially fatal. Surgery would become much riskier. Common diseases such as tuberculosis would once more threaten the lives of millions.
The problem is that some disease-causing bacteria are resistant to antibiotics. The more antibiotics are used, the sooner these resistant bacteria are selected and the quicker they multiply. Over-prescription and the indiscriminate use of antibiotics are the main causes of the current crisis, both in people and in animals.
Research to develop new antibiotics is an expensive business and drug companies no longer find it profitable. However, there are immediate recommendations to follow:
1. Don’t use or prescribe antibiotics for people or livestock unless they are really needed.
2. Don’t give antibiotics to livestock unless they have a bacterial disease. And never put antibiotics in animal feed on a routine basis (a common practice to promote rapid growth of the young animals).
3. Wait five to seven days after giving antibiotics to dairy cows before using her milk, to ensure there are no more drugs in the milk.
So, recently when I was invited to visit a dairy cooperative near Cochabamba, I happily went to show them a video about how to keep milk free of antibiotics. A friendly extensionist, who worked for the co-op, showed me to their meeting hall.
The video was filmed in Nigeria, which the farmers didn’t mind, but when I said it was in English there was an audible groan of dismay from the audience. I solved that by translating the video out loud into Spanish.
The questions from an audience tell you a lot about how they perceived a talk or a video. And in this case, they were fully on topic. One young man, who works with his parents’ dairy herd, asked if mastitis (an udder infection caused by bacteria) could be cured with herbal remedies. He had understood the message about avoiding antibiotics, but the video had not explicitly mentioned mastitis, the most common disease of dairy cows and routinely treated with antibiotics.
The friendly extensionist said that the video was important, because the farmers were reluctant to discard any milk. When the dairy rejected their milk, farmers often made it into fresh cheese and sell it locally.
The Bolivian farmers liked this Nigerian dairy video. The circumstances are a bit different in Bolivia, for example farmers bring their own milk to the dairy, while the Fulani herders in the video send the milk with young men on motorbikes. But the basic recommendations to limit the development of antibiotic resistance are similar all over the world. Videos can be an important way to educate the public about the dangers of misusing antibiotics.
Further reading
The antibiotic resistance crisis
Watch the video
Keeping milk free from antibiotics
Coming soon A video on mastitis on www.accessagriculture.org
