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FAR is promoting the development of sustainable food systems by training farmers in permaculture techniques and empowering those farmers to work with other members of their community, forming new communities of practice around regenerative agriculture, and getting the support of local trainers in person and through our mobile phone platform.
We started out with these basic observations:
• Farming lies at the heart of many of the world's most pressing social and environmental problems.
• Biodiverse farm systems designed using agro-ecological approaches offer sustainable improvements in yields and resilience.
• Development initiatives bring the most sustainable benefits when they grow out of the local community.
• We can work with the existing network of regional permaculture training centers to help rural communities build their own efficient, sustainable and ecologically regenerative food systems.​
We can empower the development of food-secure communities by training farmers to design their own regenerative food systems. Our framework for monitoring, evaluation and learning ensures that the farmers are getting the training and support that they need, that each community is developing the capacity to continue to work together into the long term, and that we continue to learn the lessons that will help us to continue improving our work with each new project.
This is how we multiply the impact of each phase of our pilot program...
Why Help?
We completed the permEzone pilot program at the end of 2023, with two projects in Kenya and one in Uganda. FAR is now running our first post-pilot project in Kenya.
Each project has a potential impact that more than justifies its cost:
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30 lead farmers representing their community, receive a permaculture design training, based on a curriculum that they have helped to create, over the initial 3-month period. They are then supported in creating 30 model farms, and sharing their knowledge and experience with other farmers in their community.
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600 farmers receive training by extension and peer-to peer education over the remainder of the 2-year project.
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3000 household dependents will benefit from improved food security and cooperative practices that help build more resilient local economies.
Helping to build the sustainability and resilience of communities of small family farmers around the world is probably the most impactful work we can engage in. At the launch of the UN’s International Year of Family Farming in 2014, the Director General, Ban Ki-Moon called for “all actors to support family farmers and take up the call to action to meet the Zero Hunger Challenge. Let us enable every man, woman and child to enjoy the right to food and adequate nutrition within our lifetime.”
José Graziano da Silva, Director-General of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, described family farmers as the guardians of the world’s agro-biodiversity and of a large part of the natural resources – soils, water, forests, fish stocks – that will be needed by future generations for their survival. In fact, they embody the paradigm of sustainable agricultural development that we need to produce food and preserve the environment.