Farming students receive production inputs
Farmers from all over the Mopani District received working tools from the Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development (DALRRD) in collaboration with the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) recently in Benfarm village in Phalaborwa.
The farmers are part of the Farmers Field School (FFS), which was established in 2017 by DALRRD and FAO.
The school follows a group-based adult learning approach that assists farmers to experiment and solve their production and value chain problems independently.
It is a community-based and practically orientated field study process involving groups of farmers who meet regularly to study the “how and why” of a given situation, under the guidance of a facilitator to effectively manage the agro-ecosystem for agricultural productivity.
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They received tools which including rakes, digging forks, hand hoes, knapsack sprayers, measuring tapes, seed (spinach, beetroot, tomato, onion, cabbage, maize, okra, watermelon, butternut, mustard, and green beans), seedling trays, 2700 litres Jojo tanks, wires to tie the tanks, cement, wheelbarrows, flip stands, charts and markers.
The focus areas of FFS are to grow healthy crops, observe fields regularly, conserve natural enemies of crops and for the farmers to understand ecology and become experts in their own field.
