CARE’s Farmer Field and Business School (FFBS) model focuses on improving small-scale farmers’ productivity, resilience and access to markets. FFBS is a hands-on, learning-by-doing approach through which groups of farmers meet regularly during the course of their value chain production cycle to learn about new agricultural techniques and to experiment these treatments on group-managed demonstration plots. Since 2014, FFBS has directly improved the lives of more than 2.5 million farmers and their families.

In Nepal, underneath CARE’s new Scaling FFBS Program, farmers have had the opportunity to lead both seed selection and evaluation in their selected value chain. The wheat value chain was selected by 150 farmer groups that consist of over 3,000 members with 70 percent of them women. Wheat is the second major cereal crop in the Sapatari and Siraha districts of the Madhesh province where this program is being implemented.

The farmers of this program identified the use of old wheat varieties, coupled with the absence of high-quality seeds, resulting in low farming yields. Use of higher quality and improved seeds increases yield by 20-25 percent alone. Typically within Nepal, the Nepal Agriculture Research Council (NARC) serves as a research wing of the government to generate various varieties and breeds of seeds after they pass through its rigorous process of varietal selection. These varieties are developed considering various yield attributes and adaptability factors in different agro-ecological zones. However, these development processes are mostly completed within research stations, which does not include the very limited participation of the farmers themselves. This often results in a lack of adaptability in farmers’ plots when they are not allowed the option of choosing the best varietal among those available. This process is mostly determined by the “what” of which variety should be planted without considering the “who” of the farmers who are actually carrying out the production cycle themselves.