Transferring Knowledge and Technologies for Agricultural Growth: The Farmer-to-Farmer model

This article is a contribution to a week-long blog carnival on USAID’s John Ogonowski and Doug Bereuter Farmer-to-Farmer (F2F) Program. From July 14-18, F2F program partners and American volunteers are sharing their knowledge and experience of providing technical assistance to farmers, farm groups, agribusinesses, service providers, and other agriculture sector institutions in developing and transitional countries. This blog carnival aims to capture and share this program experience. You can find all contributions on Agrilinks.

We at Winrock have very much enjoyed contributing to and reading the many stories of inspiration, impact, and people-to-people interactions on the Farmer-to-Farmer blog carnival. What strikes our Farmer-to-Farmer team is the demonstration in these stories that solutions to agriculture growth and food security already exist – the technologies, techniques and best practices of farmers worldwide have found a collective home in Farmer-to-Farmer. The ingenuity of volunteers to adapt their own experiences to the challenges that their hosts face is a testimony to people-to-people exchange – the key is spending time with farmers to fully understand the nature of their challenges in order to find the most effective solutions.

The long-standing challenge for agricultural growth and food security is less about an absence of appropriate technologies, techniques and practices….its finding effective channels to get already known and adapted best practices to those farmers who not only need it most, but also have the ability to spread this new knowledge to other farmers for lasting impact in the entire community. Across the decades, Farmer-to-Farmer has proven to be one of the most effective channels for fostering significant impact on farmers, at a scale that few other models have achieved.

Winrock is proud to be a part of such a transformative program!

As aligned with Feed the Future, the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative, F2F works to support inclusive agriculture sector growth, facilitate private sector engagement in the agriculture sector, enhance development of local capacity and promote climate-smart development. Volunteer assignments address host-led priorities to expand economic growth that increases incomes and improves access to nutritious food. Read more articles on this topic on Agrilinks. Also, make sure to subscribe (http://bit.ly/AgrilinksF2F) to receive a daily digest in your inbox, for one week only!