Grow Against the Flow

Start date: 1 January 2020
End date: 31 December 2022

The cultivation of crops outside the regular cropping calendar (the “off-season”) when supply is low and prices are high can make an important contribution to year-round availability of nutrient-rich food to consumers, and to the income of smallholder farmers. For Cambodia and Lao PDR, this means the production of vegetables during the dry months (March-July) and the wet months (August-October).

The goal of the “Grow Against the Flow” project is to make vegetables more available, affordable and accessible by enabling smallholder farmers in Cambodia and Lao PDR to increase year-round production of safe vegetables. The project aims to reach and train more than 35,000 smallholder farmers and more than 70,000 households with techniques that can help them grow and harvest vegetables, even in difficult climatic conditions. This will increase income and livelihood outcomes for the farmers reached, while simultaneously and positively impacting food and nutritional security in their communities and fostering women’s empowerment to create more resilient communities.

Project partners are the World Vegetable Center (WorldVeg), to provide a package of safe, ready-to-scale technologies for off-season production of key vegetables in Cambodia and Lao PDR; East-West Seed-Knowledge Transfer (EWS-KT), which will lead activities to intensively build the technical capacity of farmers in Cambodia, and provide technical training to trainers in Lao PDR to promote improved off-season vegetable production; iDE, to develop a behavior change communication strategy to expand the adoption of off season vegetable production technologies and promote vegetable consumption; and the Lao PDR Department of Agriculture’s Clean Agriculture Standards Center, to promote LaoGAP standards and monitor quality of vegetables produced in the off-season.

A study by WorldVeg in Bangladesh showed that training farmers in off-season vegetable production increased their net household income during the off-season by 48% on average. However, the study also showed that pesticide use during the off-season increased.

The WorldVeg package of safe, ready-to-scale technologies for off-season vegetable production includes seed or seedlings of high-performance vegetable varieties suitable for production under adverse climatic conditions; safe and sustainable pest and disease management methods; low cost protected cultivation methods such as rain shelters, low cost tunnels, and colored poly net-houses; and water management technologies including drip irrigation and low-cost mulches for the dry season, and appropriate tile drainage during the wet season.

The project will improve the overall livelihoods of women and their families. Women are involved in all phases of agricultural production. Although women’s labor at the plot level accounts for about 40% of the total field work in crop production, data on women’s participation in seed selection, input purchasing, output marketing, processing, etc. are lacking. There is widespread consensus that women devote more time than men to many of these activities. The new packages for off-season vegetable production will increase economic returns per unit area significantly; the women’s work will increase family income and their intra-household bargaining power.

This project is built around several scaling strategies to ensure the uptake of the proven innovations on a large scale: on-farm demonstrations; facilitation of commercial supplies of inputs; training farmers and improving their access to proven affordable technologies; collaborating with national research and extension systems to influence public policies and programs; strengthening the capacity of local public-private partners and stakeholders; and communication strategies to improve knowledge and influence behaviors.