Soils, Food and Healthy Communities

Stephanie Enloe sits down to interview Dr. Jahi Chappel, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Agroecology, Water, and Resilience at the University of Coventry, and Professor Rachel Bezner Kerr, a long-standing SFHC research collaborator. The interview includes a discussion of Professor Bezner Kerr’s work with SFHC in Malawi, and Dr. Chappell’s recent book, “Beginning to End Hunger.”

Listen to the podcast here!

(Check out the original blog post by Christian Elliot and explore more content from Cornell University CALS’s department of Development Sociology.)

Earlier this month, SFHC Collaborator Rachel Bezner Kerr attended the exciting launch of new BiodivERsA projects in Helsinki–including their support for SFHC’s own FARMS4Biodiversity.

BiodivERsA is a network of funding organizations united to support research on the conservation and sustainable management of biodiversity and ecosystem services. The network inludes 35 agencies and ministries from 23 European countries. Since 2005, BiodivERsA has funded about 70 different pan-European research projects.

The FARMS4Biodiversity team has already begun its innovative, ambitious work to collect and analyze data on species diversity and ecosystem services, while moving forward with plans to create a multi-actor platform that will examine scenarios of land-use change generated by the project.

Katherine Torday Gulden at NIBIO has written this informative article about the project’s launch; follow the link to learn more about the project’s aims and structure.

David Banda of SFHC and Stephanie Enloe of Cornell University recently presented their work on the FARM for Biodiversity project at the Agroecology for the 21st Century Conference in Cape Town, South Africa. You can see their presentation here.

Watch the teaser below, produced by film students at the University of Cape Town, to receive a primer on agroecology prepared especially for this exciting event.

We’ve added a new page to our site as we launch an ambitious new project, FARMS4Biodiversity. FARMS brings together a team of researchers, farmers, scientists, policy-makers, and many others from around the world. We are so excited to have the opportunity to share our progress with you.

During the week of January 14th, multiple international and Malawian members of the FARMS team met in Malawi to begin work on the new project. Project members worked out a plan for ecological data sampling, in which the team will assess beneficial insects (i.e. bees, parasitoid wasps, and beetle predators) using bowl traps and pitfall traps. The project coordinator and farmer promoters were trained in using these techniques.

The team will also sample pest damage through visual inspection of maize and bean plants. Team members decided upon the best protocol for collecting these data.

Finally, one farmer promotor will conduct bird surveys on participating farms with both visual and acoustic detections. Over the course of two weeks in the latter half of January, the team identified approximately 60 fields in 24 villages where they will perform these collections and surveys.

We look forward to sharing new developments from FARMS as they unfold!

Stephanie Enloe, Rachel Bezner Kerr, Sidney Madsen and Noelle LaDue shared their work with SFHC this October at the 7th Annual Sociology of Development Conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During a section of the conference entitled “Participatory Research for Food Security Among Smallholder Farming Households in Africa and Latin America,” Madsen and LaDue’s presentation covered the co-production of knowledge through semi-structured interviews as part of the Carasso project. Bezner Kerr and Enloe presented their work on agroecological pest management during the same session.

The conference’s stated purpose was to explore obstacles to global development from diverse perspectives. To paraphrase a slide from Madsen and LaDue’s presentation, there is room in development work to demystify science, acknowledge the co-production of knowledge, and challenge who can generate scientific knowledge. Participatory research helps balance scientific rigor with accessibility, and ensure that development projects engage with the needs of the community as they articulate them–not solely as they are interpreted by outsiders.

New from the Cornell Chronicle, a story about the Ecological Learning Collaboratory we discussed in our previous post. Read the Chronicle article here!

The article does a wonderful job providing additional details on the workshop, its goals, and its future. SFHC looks forward to its continued partnership with workshop participants from Tanzania and India, and we are delighted that the gathering attracted interest from both Ritsumeikan University and the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy. We hope that this is the first step in a dialogue across institutions, organizations, and hemispheres.

Worth highlighting is a quote from SFHC’s own Laifolo Dakishoni (excerpted from the article above):

“Whatever ideas are generated here, we will continue discussing…This will be an evolution. We’ll get some ideas, we’ll test them under our own conditions, and if it doesn’t work we’ll go back to the people where it is working … and get their advice.”

We look forward to keeping you up-to-date in this ongoing experiment in knowledge production and problem-solving.

Supported by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Ecological Learning Collaboratory (ELC) launched last week at Cornell University. The ELC was born out of several international organizations’ shared interest in supporting healthy communities, food sovereignty, fair trade and control of production, and ecologically sustainable solutions. Organized by Cornell faculty members Neema Kudva, Rachel Bezner Kerr, and Stacey Langwick, international partners from India, Malawi, and Tanzania participated in an intensive workshop from May 29th through June 2nd. Agroecology, wildlife, health, social justice, value-addition and engaged knowledge were just some of the topics covered. Speakers from many different fields presented their work to the group, and participants took trips to health clinics, farms, festivals and markets.

The SFHC team had the honor of hosting a dinner for over 40 guests, including workshop participants, donors, students and interested members of the Ithaca, NY community. They shared videos of project trainings and spoke on the nature of their work in Malawi, emphasizing the ways SFHC engages with complex social issues while supporting sustainable agricultural landscapes.

The workshop was a terrific opportunity for collaboration, knowledge exchange and spreading awareness. To read more about the ELC and its future, visit the project’s web page here.

SFHC affiliates and team members (Rachel Bezner Kerr, Hanson Nyantakyi-Frimpong, Laifolo Dakishoni, Esther Lupafya, Lizzie Shumba, Isaac Luginaah and Sieglinde S. Snapp) have just released a new paper on the political ecology of climate change in Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems.

The paper, entitled “Knowledge politics in participatory climate change adaptation research on agroecology in Malawi,” is available online for free reading here.

Check out the abstract below:

“Climate change is projected to have severe implications for smallholder agriculture in Africa, with increased temperatures, increased drought and flooding occurrence, and increased rainfall variability. Given these projections, there is a need to identify effective strategies to help rural communities adapt to climatic risks. Yet, relatively little research has examined the politics and social dynamics around knowledge and sources of information about climate-change adaptation with smallholder farming communities. This paper uses a political ecology approach to historically situate rural people’s experiences with a changing climate. Using the concept of the co-production of knowledge, we examine how Malawian smallholder farmers learn, perceive, share and apply knowledge about a changing climate, and what sources they draw on for agroecological methods in this context. As well, we pay particular attention to agricultural knowledge flows within and between households. We ask two main questions: Whose knowledge counts in relation to climate-change adaptation? What are the political, social and environmental implications of these knowledge dynamics? We draw upon a long-term action research project on climate-change adaptation that involved focus groups, interviews, observations, surveys, and participatory agroecology experiments with 425 farmers. Our findings are consistent with other studies, which found that agricultural knowledge sources were shaped by gender and other social inequalities, with women more reliant on informal networks than men. Farmers initially ranked extension services as important sources of knowledge about farming and climate change. After farmers carried out participatory agroecological research, they ranked their own observation and informal farmer networks as more important sources of knowledge. Contradictory ideas about climate-change adaptation, linked to various positions of power, gaps of knowledge and social inequalities make it challenging for farmers to know how to act despite observing changes in rainfall. Participatory agroecological approaches influenced adaptation strategies used by smallholder farmers in Malawi, but most still maintained the dominant narrative about climate-change causes, which focused on local deforestation by rural communities. Smallholder farmers in Malawi are responsible for <1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet our results show that the farmers often blame their own rural communities for changes in deforestation and rainfall patterns. Researchers need to consider differences knowledge and power between scientists and farmers and the contradictory narratives at work in communities to foster long-term change.”

We are pleased to announce some exciting new developments at the SFHC Farmer Research and Training Center! A new pig and poultry enclosure, pictured above, was made possible through funding received from Friends of SFHC. We extend our deepest gratitude to our donors, and invite anyone interested in following the center’s development to check out our construction page here.

Pictured below, you’ll see we also have a new water tank at the center built by farmers.

Once again, a big thank you to our donors for making projects like these possible. If you’re interested in contributing, you can find more information here. We hope to have many more exciting developments to share with you as construction continues.