![]() Heifer works with smallholders to fortify this connection between food security and resilient communities. Photo by Olivier Asselin/Heifer International. “They know it as perfectly as they know all the lines of their hands.” Rose Nambi with her grandson Elias and granddaughter Safrina in their corn field in Zambia. “It is the way that they look at the land,” he said. Supplying the local food system and feeding the community, he argues, often amounts to more than a profession for the world’s smallholders. It is actually a way of life,” said Oscar Castañeda, Heifer's senior vice president of Americas programs. “A smallholder farmer is not only a farmer for his or her profession. Though the land smallholders work and the total quantity they produce may be dwarfed by their larger, industrial counterparts, their impact on the world is anything but minimal: According to recent research, farms smaller than 5 acres produce roughly 35% of the world’s food, and smallholders provide up to 80% of the food supply in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Smallholder farmers, sometimes referred to as “small-scale farmers,” include farmers who own the land they work and those who do not. With the right knowledge, tools and inputs, farming families like the Hansda’s can earn a Sustainable Living Income and supply their communities with nutritious food.Ī smallholder farmer is a producer who rears livestock, raises fish or cultivates crops on a limited scale: In the developing world, a smallholder farm is a family-owned enterprise operating on up to 10 hectares, or 24 acres, with most smallholder farmers cultivating less than 2 hectares, or 5 acres, of land.Ī smallholder farmer is often characterized as a family farmer since many rely on relatives’ labor to meet production needs, and they typically retain a portion of their harvest for household consumption. Heifer International believes ending poverty and hunger begins with agriculture, and smallholder farmers are at the heart of this effort. The Hansdas are just one of the estimated 500 million smallholder farming households worldwide, a cohort of agriculturalists amounting to more than 2 billion people. The Hansda family - Budhini and her husband Barial with their son Kartik and daughter Jyotsana - sit with vegetables from their garden. Since then, she improved the quantity and quality of her garden’s yield, most of which she sells at the local market and some she keeps for her family’s consumption. “On our 1-acre land, we cultivate eggplant, cauliflower, beans, chili, pumpkins, okra, cabbage and spinach according to the season,” said Budhini, who received training on farming practices from Heifer India. Together with her husband, she uses buckets and bowls to irrigate the green stalks growing in neat rows, taking great care in shepherding their crops from seedling to healthy plant to harvest. For much of her day, Budhini Hansda tends to the vegetables on her family’s small plot of land in Odisha, India.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |