Farmer training can enhance rural rice farming

Focus

By JEROMY KAVI
PAPUA New Guinea is blessed with many renewable resources.
However, this abundance of wealth is not benefitting the majority of our citizens despite 93 per cent of it is under customary ownership.
This is quite clear in the agriculture sector.
Despite the vast potential for our farmers to produce much food for domestic and commercial purposes, they lack appropriate enabling factors to fully develop these capacities for socio-economic benefits.
Besides poor communication and road networks, about 80 per cent of our rural population still lacks basic education.
To help address this, the National Agricultural Research Institute (Nari) is embracing training smallholder farmers in basic farm management skills.
This has been done under many projects over the years.
One of these is the mechanisation the grassroots rice sector pilot project in Morobe which is funded by the PNG-Australia Partnership’s Incentive Fund.
The project promotes good management skills in scale rice production and gender and social inclusion (Gesi) in its programmes.
As any other crop, farming of rice requires good management skills.
Mechanising the grassroots rice sector project particularly targets the development of farm management skills to improve cost of production and use of resources to achieve good quality of produce and their market value.
Farmers are provided managerial skills through training.
Our challenge is how to assist the farmer to understand the new managerial skills they need.
Training is guided by the use of farmer training of trainer manuals.
The training captures aspects of best management practices for production and post-harvest processes of rice as well as the handling and processing devices, basic record keeping and gender and social inclusively.
One of the essential skills farmers are able to acquire is processes involved in producing rice.
Farmers develop an understanding of types of rice and how to provide required conditions in order to achieve high quality results.
They are capacitated to apply recommended processes of selecting, assessing, and planting viable rice seeds.
Ultimately, farmers are reskilled to understand the benefits of managing the value chain of their crop from seedling through to harvesting and milling stages to the point of sale.
An important part of this is getting farmers to identify and control potential pests and disease threats to the crop.
In PNG, common or serious problems are caused by pests such as rice bugs and brown plant hopper and diseases such as “rice blasts” and “brown leaf spots”.
Farmers are shown various control measures and their advantages and disadvantages.
While they are encouraged to use chemical pesticides, they are made aware of the risks involved.
They are also advised about “organic” or non-chemical methods such as planting rice in healthy soils; destroying seeds from diseased plants and using legume plants to restore nutrients to the soil before a next rice crop is planted.
Basic record keeping training is focussed on helping farmers understand and apply basic agri-business management practices.
This has several advantages.
Firstly, it helps them to keep appropriate business records.
They are made aware of the importance of recording details about different aspects of production, marketing engagements as well as associated cost and benefits.
Such records may range from the size of the fields; the number of seedlings planted all the way to the weight of good and bad harvests, as well as how much was spent and made from the production and sale of milled rice.
Good records will help them to assess and understand how activities at different stages of production influenced the quality of the final product.
In the long run, the farmers will make informed decisions that can improve the performance and levels of profitability of their rice farms.
Farmers are shown various methods of threshing.
These methods are mainly manual using simple techniques and tools.
Options for threshing range from use of drums and logs to wires and simple machines like the foot thresher.
Farmers also learn different drying and winnowing options and how to provide best storage conditions in the form of paddy rice before milling.
They are made aware of the importance of doing the drying process well in order to be able to store threshed grains for more than two years.
Different rice milling methods are also captured in the training.
These are also largely manual practices featuring simple tool options such as the use of filled cut jeans, tongtong and kisar or the rolling tongtong.
Alternatives for appropriate power or motorised mills are also introduced to the farmers.
Besides the micro mill, the project also promotes the use of solar rice mills.
The solar mill option is currently piloted in Morobe, funded by the PNG-Australia partnership through the Incentive Fund, with the support of Trukai Industries, the provincial government and PNG Women in Agriculture Foundation.
The project has also accorded a great deal of emphasis on inclusive participation of the women folk.
At all project sites, women groups aligned to faith-based, farmer cooperatives and other relevant civil organisations are engaged.
Through these arrangements, women are able to undergo training on farm management and application of different rice cultivation processes.
Many leading women rice farmers have been identified as a result of this.
This has also helped to boost their leadership and capacity to promote good rice farming practices at wider community and their respective family circles.
There are plans to roll out this training to other parts of the country.
Therefore, further support is needed from other government and non-government organisations to generate and align better training packages with consistent monitoring and evaluation to assist in shifting farmers’ mindsets and practices from subsistence to agri-farm business models, in the near future.
Together, we can do much more to improve the livelihoods and socio-economic welfare of rural farmers.

  • Jeromy Kavi is a junior projects’ social scientist based at Nari’s Mamose Research Centre in Lae, Morobe.