"Small farmers that want to progress -- they have to learn. The best and the cheapest way is to learn from each other."

Farmer 2 Farmer Learning helps farmers in developing countries become more efficient and market oriented when they learn from their experiences, and the experience of their colleagues. We continue our series of interviews with the N2Y2 Featured Projects with an interview with Don Jansen, Program Manager of the DE Foundation, the organization that runs Farmer 2 Farmer Learning.

You can listen to the interview on the NetSquared Podcast, or read the edited transcript below.

Don Jansen: My name is Don Jansen. I am the Program Manager of the DE Foundation. DE stands for Douwe Egberts, which is the biggest coffee brand in the Netherlands. It's owned by Sara Lee. As Program Manager, I am responsible for six projects we have with coffee farmers, and the first coffee project I had was in Vietnam.

We saw that a lot of farmers did things in their farms which were not really optimal - in fact, many of them applied, for example, too many fertilizers, and others applied too little fertilizers - and I thought, well, we can do a lot of experiments and then try to find out, in a scientific way, what is the best way to do things. But that will cost a fortune, and it will take a long time to find out. But why not use the farmers themselves? Because they have, in all their fields, in fact, a huge experiment, with a lot of treatments.

And so we asked farmers whether they would be willing to provide us with the data, by registering what they do every day in the field, and then I developed a software in Excel, because I am not a real big programmer, so I just do things in a silly way. But it was also just to try out, because we had no clue where this would get us.

And it proved to be very interesting, both for us, and for the farmers, because they liked it very much, to do this kind of thing. Not so much the registration, of course, but the way it was used. Each farmer who participated got, every year, a kind of financial report about their income - the costs, etc. involved, but also the biophysical relations. So, how much nitrogen did you put in, and how much coffee cherries did you get out?

The thing they liked most was that we compared farmers among each other, and then you could clearly see that some people perform much better than others. So with even less input, they got much higher yields, for example. And not only one year, but also the next year, and the year after. So that triggered a lot of discussion in the groups of farmers that we have. We called it Farmer Field Schools, and there were learning groups.

We noticed that after several years, a lot of farmers that, before, applied far too little, they moved to a little bit higher application, and increased yields enormously. And the ones that over-applied, they minimized a lot on this one, and still have the same yields. So we reduced the cost for those guys - and girls; it's about 50-50 men and women there - we reduced the costs enormously.

And if you asked farmers - because the project now is finished, but when we asked farmers at the end of the project - "What did you like most?" This registration and learning, came out as the top, number one thing that they liked.

And so we thought, OK, we did it here, in this project. With colleagues, we have other projects in Vietnam. They tried it out there. It worked, also, very well. In Peru, with the project of the foundation, we tried it out. Their people don't use that much input, but still, farmers do things in very different ways, and also there you see big interest in farmers to learn from each other. And now also we started just recently in Kenya, but that's just at the start, and we still have to see how that'll work out.

But now we get to the problem, that this macro software in Excel, well, it's slow. It's difficult to install. It is hard to maintain. Nobody understands it except me. [laughing] Well, the whole litany of things you can imagine with that one. It's not up to the task to get the few hundreds of farmers into this registration. So that's what we have to work on.

We have a track record that this kind of approach really works very well. People are very interested - farmers, at least - and we have to make a more professional software, and what we see is that this kind of software for coffee, works very well. But, in our opinion, it works with all kinds of agricultural production where people put something in to get something out and maybe they get different types of outputs which get the price according to; for example, quality or size or whatever. And you can work on optimizing your system in this way.

Britt Bravo: Can you give an example or tell a story of how Farmer 2 Farmer Learning created positive change for an individual farmer?

DJ: We have several testimonials of farmers. Mr. Luc, he said that he was really able to save maybe $100 or $200 per hectare per year, which is about 1/8 of his costs, which are not so bad. And he was even already quite a good farmer.

And we have a lady who said that she definitely wants to continue with this registration because it helped her a lot in becoming more efficient, and she was planning to buy a computer for herself, and her kids to do this kind of thing. I'm not sure whether she actually did it, but that's what she said, no? Those are a couple, and there are more people who got interested to do this.

But we saw that not only the badly performing farmers are interested, but also the good ones, because they got a much clearer picture about costs and they can try to see where they could save money. The first time I came to this area I asked farmers, "How much do you earn from your coffee?" And they looked at me and they said: "No clue."

I asked, "OK, how much do you spend on it then?" They could name some things, but the total sum, they had no clear picture. There were only two people who could do it. They had a list of inputs and outputs and those were the people that also have shops. They were used to keeping books of the stuff they got in and out of the shop. And they did more or less the same for their farm.

But out there, nobody had any idea. Now, they are much more aware of what it's about. Even though maybe they don't save that much money, they know more or less where they can trigger the system a little bit. And that becomes more and more necessary because the cost of fertilizer went up enormously in the four years or five years that we were there.

It went up I think, by about 100%, for nitrogen that is, and labor costs especially. Labor is very important for picking, but also for some other activities. Hired labor, it went up by about 50% at that time, which of course is good for the people who do the work, but for farmers it's difficult. And so farmers have to see how can they minimize their costs and what they can leave out, or do better, or whatever.

BB: What is the next step for Farmer 2 Farmer Learning? What are its goals and challenges?

DJ: We have some funding to start with this next phase, and so we hired a consultant who was involved before with a lot of software projects, and a Vietnamese software developer to get a list of requisites and to make a plan of attack.

So, the basis we have more or less ready now. But now, the actual work is to put that into real software. Yeah, that is the part where we still lack funding and that's why we are stuck a little bit at the moment because we have been trying to find whatever funding, but it's difficult. A lot of people say: "Yeah, it's interesting, but a just a little bit outside our scope."

Also, we made a kind of mistake in making the proposal that we sent around. We made it too technical and focused on the software development, but in fact the build-up of a learning system is far more interesting. I'm working on rewriting the proposal along that line. And we have some partners who are interested in doing pilots. We have an importer of fair trade tropical products who is interested, and we have another guy, but I'm not sure what his relation is, in the oil palm sector who is interested.

We have a Dutch NGO which works, among others things, with flowers and horticultural products, which is interested. So the pilots will be...I think we could get the money for them, but then the software development is the big issue.

BB: What was the positive impact for Farmer 2 Farmer Learning of going to the NetSquared Conference?

DJ: Unfortunately I was not able to attend it myself because I had a workshop on the coffee project in Honduras. Michiel Kuit who went there, is a colleague of mine, and I discussed with him about what happened. What he found very helpful was that he was able to establish some contacts and do some networking.

Although we did not get enough financial support, there are some interesting contacts that maybe could get to that. The problem was that several of those funders have their own rhythm of providing funds and getting new proposals in. One of the interesting ones, we were just not in the right timing. So maybe that will work out.

Another interesting part was that we were able to get into contact with the other projects. Of, course, not all projects were that interesting to us, but several were. For example, the GIS project, it was one of the things that we would like to do. That would be the next generation of the software, to link geographic reference information; for example, in soil types on elevation, on slope, with production in the field. Also, for example, distance to markets to see whether the prices are affected by that. Those kinds of things are interesting to do.

Another one, for example, Kabissa, would be an interesting initiative - several more like that who would like to provide access to rural people for ICT. What we noticed is that many of them focus on access, but not on content. We focus on content, but not on access. So this would be a kind of mutual benefit, I think, in the longer term. Because access without content won't work, and content without access also won't work, so that could be a nice thing to work on. But then of course, we would have to have something that would be available, and we're not yet there at the moment.

BB: How can listeners help to move your work forward?

DJ: Money! Money! [laughs]

No, the technical funding we have...We have a good software developer in Vietnam. It's a real professional organization. We have a very good consultant who understands us and who understands the software that we have, so that's also not too much of a problem.

People who would be interested in beta-testing on the technical things, yeah, that would be nice, but, the most important thing would be funding. But also, if people work with agricultural projects, (we prefer tropical countries because in western countries, farmers have access to all kind of information) for tropical countries, well, we are definitely interested in working together on pilots to see whether this approach indeed also works.

We think so, but it would be nice to really test it out and to see what should be changed, or has to be changed, or if not ok. That would be also quite interesting for us to see how that could be. It would be good to have a coffee project, a sugar project, and a milk project, and then you can get your cappuccino afterwards.

BB: Is there anything else you want people to know about Farmer 2 Farmer Learning?

DJ: Personally, I find it to be a very nice thing to work with farmers in this way because; for example, every year after the harvest, we give them the reports. If we would be a little late, they would complain that we were late, but once we hand it over, in five minutes they start discussing among each other. We never put the names of the people on them. We only put numbers. Each of them knew which number he or she was. [laughs]

So the first five minutes everyone is looking around asking, "Who is this number five, who is doing so well?" And then the discussion came in. Of course, I didn't understand a word of it because it was in Vietnamese, but it was a very, very strong discussions, and really very interesting.

That's really what people, I think, have to be doing. I've seen in other areas, in other countries, for example, in Brazil, farmers are not used to talking to each other about the crop. They talk about football and women, and that's because there are a lot of male farmers there, at least officially. But they don't talk about the crop. Small farmers that want to progress -- they have to learn. The best and the cheapest way is to learn from each other. That's what we try to stimulate. It's rewarding; I find it rewarding.

We are talking about having a big number of farmers very quickly because I think in Vietnam we have several hundreds of farmers. In Kenya, if that really pushes through, we're talking about a few thousands of farmers. That's big numbers. Even if for each farmer you can get even maybe $50 a year of cost reduction, multiply the numbers, that's relatively big amounts for those people, so it's good.

You can learn more about Farmer 2 Farmer Learning by emailing Don Jansen at don.yansen@wur.nl.