A farmer supported by the Sustainable Agriculture Program inspecting his pepper plants grown using organic inputs
Yayasan Planet Indonesia
Sustainable Agriculture and Agroforestry Program
The purpose of our Sustainable Agriculture and Agroforestry program is to enhance soil nutrition and fertility while also regenerating degraded forest lands and ensuring food security. As part of this program, we develop groups of 15-20 farmers from a CC who are then mentored by a peer-selected lead farmer trained by us. This enables us to readily share information about improved techniques and maximize knowledge sharing and learning among the farming communities. Furthermore, since 2017, we have supported communities to select and plant over 60,000 seedlings of native species in the buffer zones in our terrestrial sites and replant abandoned aquaculture pond with 38,000 mangrove seedlings in our coastal sites. This not only ensures food, nutrition and livelihood for participating smallholder farming communities but also creates crucial habitat and connectivity for wildlife, and generates regulating and provisioning services.
The key enabling factor to enable success of our sustainable agriculture program is the ability to demonstrate production benefits both in terms of higher yields and reduced cost for farmers. Other conditions that position this intervention as a building block in our overall program model is the relation between agriculture production and deforestation. This factor enables the intervention to be well positioned to achieve cross-sectoral outcomes of improved food security, reduced deforestation, and improved economic security.
We have learned that a graduation style of an approach is extremely important. Often asking farmers to make too large of leaps in changing their behavior can be overwhelming, discouraging, and deter local action. A graduation approach makes changing behavior “gradual” and rewards farmers for small steps that are used to reach an overall goal. Therefore, as farmers move from step one to step two, they are adopting small changes (e.g. intercropping, semi-organic vs chemical), until they reach step four, which is a farmer who graduates from the program. This has been an important lesson learned for our organization.