Agriculture

Farmer Extension and Producer Group Organization

Over 40,000 families have benefitted from COMACO’s outreach training in skills designed to help small-scale farmers become self-sufficient in food production with access to markets for their farm surplus.   The key to COMACO’s approach in achieving food security is its farmer extension and producer group organization.

COMACO currently supports 43 area manager extension officers who reside within participating communities and supervise the training and technical support for the 34,381 farmers currently registered as COMACO producers.  This represents a ratio of approximately 800 farmers per area manager.  Overseeing area managers is a staff of 7 regional extension managers, who in turn are led by two senior extension managers.

Lead Farmers:

Considering the high farmer to area extension manager ratio, a key part of farming technology transfer is the lead farmer.  Currently, COMACO has identified and trained a total of 639 lead farmers, based on their past compliance with required farming practices and their willingness and interest in helping their fellow-farmers to improve skills.  This represents a ratio of about 50 farmers to 1 (lead farmer + area manager) or about 3 to 5 producer groups per lead farmer.  Benefits and incentives for serving as an effective lead farmer include the following:

• Lead farmers receive a commission for every new farmer they recruit and train, based on verification of approved farming practices by the area manager
• Lead farmers who remain supportive throughout the farming season and produce the best results in terms of compliance and yields are chosen as part of a smaller group of lead farmers to serve as commodity purchasing agents, who receive commissions for every kg of commodities sold to COMACO.

This level of organization provides a flow of technical guidance and verification of use of improved farming practices that include a mix of farming techniques, including:

• Home-based fertilizer-making with compost and bio-char
• Mulching
• Crop thinning
• Weeding techniques
• Crop rotation
• Minimal or zero-tillage techniques
• Pot-holing
• Plowing techniques to remove hard-pan and increase root penetration
• Inter-cropping with agroforestry
• Water management
• Planting densities

Under this current system of extension support, COMACO has achieved higher levels of farming compliance than in previous years, averaging above 80%.  In addition to lead farmers complementing and reinforcing the work of area managers, selected lead farmers maintain his or her farm plots as demo plots, where lead farmers bring farmers for instruction and where different practices are used to compare results with control or “traditional” methods.  These demo plots are visited and supported by the area managers.  COMACO currently has 225 demo plots, which promote local adoption of preferred farming methods.

Producer Group Organization:

Group members are organized into producer groups, which have their own elected group leader. COMACO currently has 2033 producer groups.  Twice during the year, producer group leaders are provided farmer cards for each of their members.  These cards provide an important role for groups to monitor their own farming practices, crops, yields and sales.   Area managers collect the cards at the appropriate time and results become the basis for follow-up compliance inspections by extension staff to select the best lead farmers as commodity buying agents. 

Producer groups are organized into Producer Group Cooperatives for each chiefdom with respective elected leaders.  These cooperatives are registered through the District Agricultural Officer and the Registrar of Civil Societies.  This level of farmer-based organization affords COMACO the opportunity of working with peer-identified leaders.  These leaders provide valued assistance in mobilizing cooperation among group members to abide by conservation norms (e.g. no poaching, snaring, or making commercial charcoal) and improved farming practices.  They also assist COMACO in a) building farmer loyalty in growing food crops suitable for their soils and supportive of COMACO products and b) providing security and administration of their community trading depots, which serve as market and training centres. 

Producer Group Cooperatives and their leaders also play an important role in helping organize Field Day learning events, which are usually convened near the community trading depot. These are generally attended by group leaders and lead farmers, though anyone can attend. This allows information exchange between participants while facilitating the introduction of new ideas and skills, not necessarily limited to farming (family nutrition, bee-keeping techniques, dry season farming with treadle pump, chicken husbandry, etc.). Attendance is typically above 100. Topics range from improved techniques for improving bee-occupancy of bee hives to family nutrition.  COMACO provides support for lunch and uses these field days as another way of building loyalty and support for the social and environmental objectives the company works for.  Cooperative leaders advertize the field day dates and encourages good attendance.  During the year, COMACO hold 4-8 field days for a given chiefdom.

Better Life Book

In addition to field day events, over the past six months, COMACO developed a new learning tool called the Better Life Book. This book provides written guidelines on technical methods and practices for a range of topics and consists of a strong plastic folder with loose sheets of heavy paper with educational material printed on them.  Each page is referred to as a Learning Page.   The book currently has 23 pages with enough copies to give to each of COMACO’s registered producer groups.  Producer groups meet monthly to share lessons and experiences and during these meetings the Better Life Book becomes a focal point of information for explaining better practices to improve family welfare and good health while living in harmony with their environment.