Since their opening in 2017 through funding from the Government of Canada, the Training Center and Demonstration Farm have served as the base of all SFHC activities. We are grateful that funding though the Biovision Foundation for Ecological Development and donations from supporters have helped us to expand the FRTC over the years! You can watch a visual tour by clicking here!
Farmer Research and Training Center
The Farmer Research and Training Center provides a central space from which to facilitate farmer-to-farmer exchange, training, and experimentation. Conceived over several years, inspired by visits to similar centers and cooperatives in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, and India, this unique space includes classrooms, offices, a community space for meetings of the General Assembly, a dining hall and kitchen for recipe testing and meal preparation. We have also constructed dormitories that allows visiting farmers to stay and take part in SFHC activities on site. The project has helped facilitate visits from collaborating researchers and students.
Demonstration Farm
The Demonstration Farm is designed to demonstrate agroecological farming methods, test seed varieties, and serve as a resource for farmer training. It includes:
- Dryland cropping system with demo plots (including cereals, drought-tolerant grains, tubers and legumes, and cover crops)
- Vegetable Growing Area with demo plots including legumes, leafy greens, fruits, herbs, roots, and tubers.
- Herb and Medicinal Growing Area
- Orchards include orange, avocado, lemon, lime, banana, and papaya trees, with collection pits (shown below) that serve as a water supply for banana trees.
- Woods for shade and agroforestry
- Rainwater harvesting tank, holding up to 36, 000 liters of water
- Livestock enclosure
- Fish pond
- Wind barrier around the fields
- Beehives
- Black Soldier Fly enclosure
This is something to know more especially us in Africa.I would love this kind of information and practical farming can be extended to our countries. And volunteerizm can be encouraged
What contact or cooperation have you had with the established permaculture training centers in Malawi: Never Ending Food, Kusamala Institute and Permaculture Paradise Institute? These are already well developed and have a large fund of information relevant to lifting subsistence farmers out of the ills of the AGRA model: overcoming malnutrition and thus preventing stunting, wasting, poverty and degradation of the soil. They withstand drought (even the huge one in 2015-16) and they are profitable. Building networks of like-minded orgs is crucial. The people need to know what other individuals and villages are doing. So priority ought to be given to connections. The cause needs to be common.