Virtual Farming: Learning About Agroecology Through WhatsAppIn January of 2020, I was naive. Well, weren’t we all. I have a distinct memory of reading the headline of a New York Times article on my Facebook feed concerning the Coronavirus in China in January. I scrolled right past the article and thought little about it. At the time, I was more concerned with completing my application for the Global Social Benefit Fellowship (GSBF). Naive. At the end of the month, after completing the application and interview process, I was accepted as a Global Social Benefit Fellow and was assigned to work with Development in Gardening, more lovingly referred to as DIG. DIG is a social enterprise that improves the nutrition and livelihoods of uniquely vulnerable individuals living below the poverty line—people living with HIV, people living with disabilities, refugees and young mothers—by cultivating community gardens and providing farmer training programs in Kenya, Uganda and Senegal. These restorative gardens not only provide nourishing food but also a source of supplemental income for the farmers. In entering the fellowship, I was particularly eager to learn more about how sustainable, community-based agriculture can be used as a tool to address injustices within communities across the world. My fellowship partner, Bryn, and I planned to travel to Kenya to evaluate the effectiveness of the farmer training programs, identify problems within the enterprise that would prevent future scaling, and develop solutions that would directly address the needs of both the enterprise and its beneficiaries. However, weeks before the start of the fellowship, Covid-19 began spreading throughout the world and the international component was no longer feasible. Bryn and I were faced with the decision of either leaving the fellowship to pursue other opportunities, or engaging in remote conversations with the DIG executives, field managers and farmers to identify and address the new challenges the enterprise was facing in light of the pandemic. We eagerly committed to the remote 9-month action research fellowship and began devising updated project management plans and timelines for the research and solution development phases of the projects. As one component of the fellowship, we managed the enterprise’s social media presence to learn more about the systems of communication between the farmers, field managers, executives and DIG’s audience. Although we weren’t able to touch the soil in the community gardens, we were exposed to the stories and images that field managers shared of farmers in Kenya, Uganda and Senegal. Through these stories and images, we learned about the various crops that farmers were growing in their gardens, the innovative and resourceful practices they were implementing and the markets at which they sold their excess produce. However, because our action research focussed so heavily on the communication strategies and the engagement of partners and donors, I didn’t spend much time thinking about the agricultural practices integrated into the DIG curriculum and implemented by the farmers.
During the fall quarter of this year, I took a class called “Agriculture, Environment and Development in Latin America.” In the class, I learned about agroecology in the context of smallholder farmer communities in Latin America. Agroecology, as I came to understand it, refers to farming methods that are based on the application of ecological principles, such as recycling plant biomass and promoting biodiversity. The emphasis in agroecology is on the ecological principles, which can be adapted and applied to different communities based on the environmental, social, political and economic conditions and needs. Although the definition of agroecology and the terminology used in conjunction with the concept was unfamiliar to me, I was actually quite familiar with the application of agroecology in vulnerable communities. The farmers I had been interviewing and WhatsApp messaging in Kenya, Uganda and Senegal all summer were implementing many of those agroecological principles. They were recycling nutrients by composting plant matter and working into their soil; they were protecting their gardens from insect damage by planting a diversity of crops; they were assuring favorable soil conditions by practicing crop rotation and cover cropping. DIG’s programs exemplify the effective implementation of the agroecological model. DIG caters its programs to the specific characteristics and needs of the communities it works in and the community gardens reflect that. Although we weren’t able to travel to Kenya and get our hands dirty in the garden soil, I am grateful for the images and stories that were shared with us over WhatsApp from the field. Even more so, I am grateful for the opportunity to work with an enterprise that grows “health, wealth and a sense of belonging” through agroecological gardens that are rooted in the community.
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