FARMERS’ FIELD SCHOOLS BUILDING FARMER ORGANIZATIONS

The National IPM Program builds farmers, farmer organizations, skilled government field staff, and informed management personnel. Farmer IPM graduated spray less and realized greater profits, maintain consistent yield must be increases, while gaining better decision making skills based on ecosystem analysis in their fields. Government field staff become skilled, highly motivated facilitators for IPM training and implementation.

The National IPM Program is revitalizing the existing network of village Farmer Groups by organizing and running IPM Farmers Field Schools. By design a “school without walls”, these Field Schools meet for 10-12 weeks, a crop season, from transplanting to harvest. Each Field School has about 1000 m² ‘Learning Field’ containing a farmer-run comparative study of rice field IPM. Each week farmers practice agro-ecosystem analyses which includes plant health, water management, weather, weed density, disease surveillance, and observation and collection of insect pests, beneficial predators and parasites. Farmers interpret through direct experience using agro-ecosystem analysis to make field management decisions and develop a vision of balanced ecological processes. Trainers train by allowing the farmers to be the experts, facilitating them to bring forth and examine their own experience. Trainers and farmers:

a. Produce their own learning materials from insect collections, “insect zoos”, field trial plots, posters, workbooks.

b. Create and use analytical tools from the weekly agro-ecosystem analysis chart made with newsprint and crayons and live samples to the Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats (SWOT) framework used to analyze local plans.

c. Solve problems and make decisions: IPM Specialist trainees learn to manage their own programs and farmers learn to set-up and run complex leaning activities.

The success of the IPM Farmers’ Field Schools sparked genuine political support, unanticipated administrative commitment, and gratifying financial buy-ins from local governments. Village heads, Sub-district Chiefs (Camats), and District Administrators (Bupatis) publicly endorsed IPM Field Schools as the most effective village agricultural training program ever experienced.

Training methods invite discovery, comparison, and analysis; methods lend themselves to group involvement and non-hierarchical relationships among learners and trainers. The methods become tools for continued inquiry and improvement of programs by farmers. Farmers are spontaneously training other farmers without government financial support.

Analysis and action revolves around four basic principles:

· Grow a healthy crop

· Conserve beneficial predator and parasites and biological control application

· Observe fields weekly to determine management actions necessary to produce a profitable crop.

· Farmer as experts of IPM

Sustainability

As the Indonesia Pest Management Program shows tangible results, generates concrete changes in the extension system and stimulates farmer activities; buy-ins have begun. Local government officials from village head to provincials governor have provided fiscal, not just moral, support. A large number of field schools have pooled fund for follow-up activities. Sustainability is defined as the maintenance of the flow of benefits to the farmer level after the formal “project” ceases. With IPM the “take-over” process for sustainability is coming from those who see and directly benefit from the actual program and activities.

Environmental

Since the introduction of Green Revolution Technologies, insecticide has been packaged as a production component input along with fertilizers, irrigation, credit and hybrid seeds. In tropical rice, 25 years of field research has never shown that insecticides contribute to tropical rice production. In point of fact, its indiscriminant use can lead to huge losses from resurgent, pest resistance, and secondary pests as was the case in the 1975 to 1979 rice crisis.

National productions of insecticides fell over 65% since the President Decree of 1986. Despite this revolutionary shift recent surveys show that, alarmingly, 40% of all insecticide applications on rice use banned broad spectrum organophosphates, still freely sold and distributed, supposedly for other crops, in the countryside.

The IPM Program fights this directly by shrinking farmers fears through giving farmers the tools to make their own informed decisions, so they do not waste their resources, risk their health, harm their crops, and damage the environment.