Grow Ahead Blog

Rigoberto, the local coordinator for the Coffee Diversification Project in Mexico, sat down and interviewed Don Fidel, a producer and member of coffee cooperative CESMACH. Don Fidel speaks about his experience in the past farmer exchange in Nicaragua and what he looks forward to in hosting the upcoming exchange in Chiapas.

Alejandra grew up in a rural area south of Mexico City and works at the Community Agroecology Network staff as project manager for CAN’s work in Mexico.  The Community Agroecology Network, alongside cooperative partners CESMACH and PRODECOOP, and university partners from University of Vermont, Santa Clara University, Universidad Nacional Agraria, and El Colegio de la…

Vasantha Kumari, from the Amrita Bhoomi agroecology center in south India, received a scholarship from Growahead for her work on the conservation of local seeds in April 2018. Vasantha is the seed coordinator of Amrita Bhoomi, which is a farmer’s agroecology school run by the farmers movement of the state of Karnataka. Vasantha is now single-handedly managing the seed program at Amrita Bhoomi.

Grow Ahead teamed up with ANAMURI, the National Association of Rural and Indigenous Women in Chile to raise $10,000 for a “Campesina a Campesina” exchange. From November 19th-21st, 2018, rural and indigenous women from different regions of Chile came together to discuss agroecology and the peasant struggle. The central objective of farmer-to-farmer was to bring farmers and organizations together to discuss mechanisms and actions that help to disseminate and promote the agroecology as a strategy for protection of the land and environment and food sovereignty.

Grow Ahead teamed up with coffee cooperatives, CESMACH & PRODECOOP, leaders to raise $7,000 for an Assessment of On-Farm Diversification Strategies in Smallholder Coffee Systems in Mesoamerica. The event brought farmers, cooperatives, and researchers from Nicaragua, Mexico and the United States together in Estelí, Nicaragua for a week from, November 19th-23rd of 2018.

We talked to Hussen Ahmed of Soil & More Ethiopia about recycling waste from the flower industry and turning it into compost, which he provides to smallholder farmers to help regenerate their land. For Hussen, soil building with compost was an obvious solution to recycle green waste and regenerate land in a country plagued by drought and desertification.

Grow Ahead has launched a campaign to support the development of an agroecology center in Paraguay in partnership with La Via Campesina. We are raising $20,000 to train dozens of farmers, including 37 agroecology university students, and support the establishment of an aquaculture training program and other agroecological activities.

The Centre for No-Till Agriculture (CNTA) shares an update on the Grow Ahead project that was crowdfunded earlier this year. Since the project was funded, the CNTA team has begun the one-year hands on training process with 41 farmers.