Since 1985, the SPFS has incorporated a number of best practices (developed by FAO and its partners).

Farmer Field Schools

Farmer Field Schools (FFS) empowers small groups of farmers to identify the constraints and opportunities they face and apply solutions. Typically, 20 to 30 neighbouring farmers gather weekly in a field, for a full crop cycle. Many FFS focus on specialized subjects each term. For example:

• improved dairy production and marketing.
• fruit production and transformation; and
• farm business management, enterprise development and marketing.

FFS often go beyond agriculture to include literacy, health (including HIV/AIDS) and nutrition education, to become Farmers' Life Schools.

School Gardens

In many of the NPFS around the world, school gardens are being used as a way to teach children about food and nutrition-related issues. School gardens can be an excellent additional source of proteins, vitamins and minerals, adding variety and nutrition to school meals. Apart from improving child nutrition, food security lessons are passed on when school garden practices are replicated at home or in community gardens.

At the country level, there is close cooperation between the World Food Programme's (WFP) school feeding programme (Food for Education, FFE) and FAO's school garden initiatives. In close cooperation with WFP and the Millennium Development Goals Centre, FAO (through the SPFS) supports the NEPAD (New Partnership for Africa's Development) CAADP (Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme) Home-grown School Feeding initiative.

Urban and peri-urban agriculture

Through the SPFS and TeleFood, FAO is promoting urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) to improve the livelihoods and nutrition of poor families. The SPFS is showing how, in an intensively managed backyard garden, a city family can produce high-value nutritious vegetables.

Urban agriculture is generating public interest in cities as diverse as Caracas and Dakar. Senegalese experts are showing the people of Caracas how to build and maintain microgardens. Through South-South Cooperation (SSC) arrangements, Cubans have also worked in Caracas, demonstrating urban farming techniques, successfully developed when Cuba was cut off from the world market for farm inputs. Many other cities - including Asunción, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Kigali and Kinshasa, are drawing on these experiences to develop similar programmes.

Urban and peri-urban agriculture within the SPFS framework is supported by various technical divisions and by the FAO Food for the Cities PAIA.