My adventure mid-way through the conference of planting rice didn't count as a "field trip" per se because we were really there to conduct a meeting with the village leaders. I had played hooky was all. But we went on bonafide field trips in which we got excited like kids at summer camp and electrified with anticipation as we squeezed into the landrovers and headed off into the wilds of Nepal.
Monsoon season presented a few problems for us as we explored outside of Naryanghar. In this picture we had hired a small van which was top heavy and got caught in a flash flood from a heavy monsoon cloud burst that washed out the road and almost took us with it down a steep embankment on the left side of the road. It was good excitement.
Several of the women from the conference and a few new faces, mainly administrators of NGOs who were attending the conference only for the day, came along on a field trip to an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) research station which was a relatively new entity in Nepal. IPM is part of a strategy that emerged in the 1980s after the dramatic failure of the so-called "Green Revolution" to increase food yields from existing agricultural lands in the third world. Skewed thinking and experimenting with hybridization of crop plants, super fertilizers, pesticides and industrial agricultural production methods. All of this involved using a lot of chemicals that were going to "change the world" but only created havoc. The new hybrids were vulnerable to insects, diseases and the climate. The remedy was to go back to the drawing boards and find more sustainable crop production methods.
Ram Chandra, the tall one in the center, rarely looks this serious. He's a consultant and an IPM expert with a lot of practical insights that we all found useful. IPM requires educating farmers to adopt new ways of looking after their crops. One goal for the farmers is to develop methods to farm without using pesticide and that's where IPM comes in. In a nut shell, the farmers are taught about insects until they are able to discriminate between the beneficial insects, like lady bugs that increase crop productivity, and non-beneficals that destroy crops. Then the farmers are taught how to set up transects which are lines, real or imaginary, across a field or paddy where crops are growing. The farmer uses the transect as a way to "sample" insects that are present. The farmer moves along the transect looking for insects and takes a count of each type of insect he/she sees. Then the farmer takes his data to agroup of farmers, already organized as part of the IPM project, that grow the same crops he/she does and between the group of farmers a decision is made on how to respond to the insects. If all the farmers are seeing an increase in the population of a non-beneficial insect they might decide to spay some insecticice, or based on their collective experience they may not spay but wait to see if a beneficial insect might attack the predators. Another name for this process is "participatory research" or action planning. It's effective in the realm of sustainability because it improves the capacity of the farmers to make decisions that include the health of the environment where they used to just consider the economics.
My adventure mid-way through the conference of planting rice didn't count as a "field trip" per se because we were really there to conduct a meeting with the village leaders. I had played hooky was all. But we went on bonafide field trips in which we got excited like kids at summer camp and electrified with anticipation as we squeezed into the landrovers and headed off into the wilds of Nepal.
Monsoon season presented a few problems for us as we explored outside of Naryanghar. In this picture we had hired a small van which was top heavy and got caught in a flash flood from a heavy monsoon cloud burst that washed out the road and almost took us with it down a steep embankment on the left side of the road. It was good excitement.
Several of the women from the conference and a few new faces, mainly administrators of NGOs who were attending the conference only for the day, came along on a field trip to an Integrated Pest Management (IPM) research station which was a relatively new entity in Nepal. IPM is part of a strategy that emerged in the 1980s after the dramatic failure of the so-called "Green Revolution" to increase food yields from existing agricultural lands in the third world. Skewed thinking and experimenting with hybridization of crop plants, super fertilizers, pesticides and industrial agricultural production methods. All of this involved using a lot of chemicals that were going to "change the world" but only created havoc. The new hybrids were vulnerable to insects, diseases and the climate. The remedy was to go back to the drawing boards and find more sustainable crop production methods.
Ram Chandra, the tall one in the center, rarely looks this serious. He's a consultant and an IPM expert with a lot of practical insights that we all found useful. IPM requires educating farmers to adopt new ways of looking after their crops. One goal for the farmers is to develop methods to farm without using pesticide and that's where IPM comes in. In a nut shell, the farmers are taught about insects until they are able to discriminate between the beneficial insects, like lady bugs that increase crop productivity, and non-beneficals that destroy crops. Then the farmers are taught how to set up transects which are lines, real or imaginary, across a field or paddy where crops are growing. The farmer uses the transect as a way to "sample" insects that are present. The farmer moves along the transect looking for insects and takes a count of each type of insect he/she sees. Then the farmer takes his data to agroup of farmers, already organized as part of the IPM project, that grow the same crops he/she does and between the group of farmers a decision is made on how to respond to the insects. If all the farmers are seeing an increase in the population of a non-beneficial insect they might decide to spay some insecticice, or based on their collective experience they may not spay but wait to see if a beneficial insect might attack the predators. Another name for this process is "participatory research" or action planning. It's effective in the realm of sustainability because it improves the capacity of the farmers to make decisions that include the health of the environment where they used to just consider the economics.
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