Good and plentiful compost is essential to increasing the volume of coffee and nuts that each plant produces, which in turn increases income. However, individual farmers do not have enough cows to produce sufficient natural manure, and purchased compost is expensive and low quality. We brought a new compost technology to the district, and our organic compost training has been incredibly effective!
In our compost training this year, farmers learned to make 2 different kinds of compost in lidded barrels: liquid compost (easy to apply as a spray) and solid compost in mixture of natural animal dung and plant material. One of our challenges right now on the farms is pest management, so we also taught farmers to make organic pesticide, and we will see how effective it is as they utilize it.
We recently did follow-up field visits and discovered that 72% of the farmers we trained are using the plastic barrels we provided and are making compost. That’s an incredibly high rate of adoption for training in Nepal! Our field staff will do further facilitation with the remaining 28% farmers to encourage them to start the process, now that they can see other farmers using the compost with success
The high success rate of our training is because we do things a little differently at CLN than in much of Nepal. Our training is not a lecture given in a meeting room; it is out in the field, in a practical, hands-on methodology which is not so common in Nepal. In addition to farmers, we also include the agriculture technician officer (ATO) from each county and the municipality mayors. Training the ATO’s helps to create institutional knowledge about these crops and best practices at the government-funded agricultural outreach office. Including the mayors in the training helps increase local stakeholder involvement and local government funding. The local government has been contributing to our programs over the past several years, and their interest and involvement continues to increase. As an example, this year one county gave a large and generous subsidy for macadamias, and we ended up planting 13,000 seedlings instead of 3000!
Our next step in compost is to work with the local college to create a liquid compost entrepreneur track as part of their 3-year agricultural degree program. As part of that initiative, we plan to facilitate partnerships with program graduates and local dairy farms to produce compost because many coffee and nut farmers need more compost than they can produce from the animals they own, even using the new technique.
