Theme pack
Here is our latest monthly theme pack of FRI resources, this month about farmer knowledge and innovation. The items in this pack demonstrate that farmers are not dependent on external experts, that they have a wealth of knowledge and, through experience and experimentation, are constantly innovating and refining agricultural practices.
The theme pack includes sixteen scripts from Resource Packs and eleven Farmer stories from Barza Wire.
Scripts
- Restoring the past for a brighter future: Recovering and improving traditional seeds in Safo, Mali
- Ethiopian farmers restore indigenous seed varieties
- Bushbabies are meat, too: Farmers in Malawi use indigenous plants to manage pests and livestock diseases
- Preserving wild food plants ensures a better future for all
- Farmers triple sorghum yield thanks to mulch farming
- Chicken hatchery: Innovative farmer invents large-capacity kerosene egg incubator
- A Kenyan farmer uses water hyacinth to feed chickens
- Sack farming: Unlimited vegetable harvest!
- A farmer uses jatropha to protect his young oil palm seedlings from rodents
- A farmer suffocates stem borers to death and saves his cocoa farm
- Farmer uses red ants to protect fruit trees against pests
- Innovative farmer uses pounded maize cobs to protect stored maize
- Sawdust prolongs the storage life of potatoes
- New Technique Reduces Work Needed to Thin Millet
- Protecting Farmer Innovations and Traditional Knowledge
- Sharing Farmer Innovations
Barza Wire stories
- Mali: Farmers benefit from program to recover traditional seeds
- Burkina Faso: Farmers sell, eat, and treat ailments with neglected plants
- Tanzania: Villagers travel far to gather increasingly scarce wild vegetables
- Ethiopia: Farmers multiply indigenous seeds to achieve food security
- Malawi: Farmers use plant-based pesticides to control Fall armyworm and other pests
- Burundi: Farmer finds new technique for preserving tomatoes
- Congo: Milk from pumpkin seeds (Spore, Syfia, La Semaine Africaine)
- South Africa: Traditional seeds help Sekhukhune District fight hunger
- Uganda: Community group turns banana peels into inexpensive animal feed (Various Sources)
- Burkina Faso: Innovation overcomes dry conditions (IRIN, IK Notes)
- Uganda: Farmers find that human urine is an effective fertilizer (The Monitor)
Resources available in Swahili
- Maranda ya mbao yaongeza maisha ya ghala kwa viazi batata
- Tanzania: Wanakijiji wakisafiri mbali maporini kutafuta mboga za asili zinazozidi kupotea kutokana na shughuliza kibinadamu
We hope that this kind of “one-stop shop” on selected topics is useful, and that you can use the resources in this month’s theme pack to make effective programming on farmer knowledge and innovation.
Please note that three of the older scripts were written when FRI was known as DCFRN, or the Developing Countries Farm Radio Network.
This theme pack was prepared with the support of The McLean Foundation.