Family farmers and small-scale producers can solve many of the global issues related to restoring ecosystems and feeding a growing population, but more investment is needed to strengthen their knowledge and skills through extension services such as farmer field schools, a new policy brief by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) says.

What have we learned from trees? Three decades of farmer field schools on agroforestry and forestry reports that farmer field schools, providing hands-on group learning, have had a significant impact on building the ecological knowledge and problem-solving capabilities of small-scale producers, helping them to better navigate challenges in agriculture, forestry and food production.

It recommends making a greater investment in people-centred forest extension to enable smallholders to develop the necessary knowledge, skills and social organization to contribute collectively to sustainability.

“Challenges the forest and farm smallholders face are complex,” said Ewald Rametsteiner, Deputy Director of FAO’s Forest Division. “Making agriculture and forestry more sustainable requires an investment in small-scale producers’ knowledge and skills, including in mechanisms that connect locally relevant expertise and allow sharing and learning from experience. Farmer field schools are ideally suited to do just that.”

Discovery-learning-capacity building approach

Launched today at the FAO-Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) Transforming agrifood systems with forests, the publication reveals forestry-related farmer field schools have been applied in more than 20 countries across Africa, Asia and the Americas, involving more than 200 000 producers.

Farmer field schools regularly bring together around 20–30 farmers from the same region with a facilitator to observe, analyse and try out new ideas on collective study plots, before trying them in their own farms. This helps them improve their skills and encourages them to experiment, as well as to learn from observation.

Major farmer field school programmes have addressed challenges involving forests and trees fields such as fruit tree production, woodlots, community forestry, soil and water management, and protected areas.

Building knowledge

The policy brief points out that farmer field schools demonstrate the key role of better education and ecological literacy in creating change, and that they help small scale producers respond to challenges with greater creativity, knowledge and technological development.

The schools demonstrate ways to reduce the environmental impacts of agriculture while ensuring food security and contributing to restoration of ecosystems and biodiversity conservation.

For example, farmer field schools helped participants better understand how climate mitigation and adaptation improve their resilience, and why and how trees and forest ecosystems can help them regenerate fields and landscapes. The self-directed learning process also encouraged them to take ownership of change on the ground.

Key recommendations

The policy brief makes a number of recommendations to tap the potential of farmer field schools, including investing in training programmes that incorporate ecological knowledge.

It suggests promoting schemes supporting farmers to diversify production and creating market opportunities for sustainable products, as well as innovative frameworks to set up continued collaboration between scientists and farmers.

The integration of local business and income-generating activities into farmer field schools and systematically including women as participants were also key recommendations highlighted in the policy brief.