Faculty of Food and Agriculture teams up with Purdue University and USAID
Over the past three years, food and agriculture stakeholders from across Trinidad and Tobago have been engaged in a range of hands-on capacity-building exercises conducted by nearly 50 local and international volunteers.
Administered under the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Farmer-to-Farmer Programme, training activities focused on using new farming technologies, environmentally sustainable farming practices, climate resilient farming, and the creation of value-added products.
In total, an estimated 750 participants from 11 groups were trained under the project which was implemented locally by UWI St Augustine’s Faculty of Food and Agriculture (FFA) with the support of Purdue University.
Programme Director Amanda Dickson explained that she started thinking about bringing the programme to T&T when she met former FFA Dean Professor Wayne Ganpat at a 2019 Association for International Agricultural and Extension Education conference.
She recalled, “I attended [Prof Ganpat’s] sessions where he was talking about extension in the Caribbean, including some of the opportunities and challenges that the region was facing.”
Speaking on the programme, she said, “The project is titled Farmer-to-Farmer but it doesn’t necessarily have to be farmers engaging with each other. It can also be an institution and an institution, or an agribusiness and an agribusiness.”
In her capacity as an international extension specialist at Purdue University, Dickson reached out to Prof Ganpat and pitched the idea of working on a local Famer-to-Farmer project.
Ganpat said that he instantly recognised the programme’s importance because it had the potential to expose local stakeholders to a variety of agriculture perspectives and technologies from around the world.
“Purdue and Amanda have a lot of experience in this field, so we saw and jumped at the opportunity to get involved,” he said.
Stakeholders trained under the programme were selected from the Agricultural Society of T&T; the Cocoa Development Company Ltd; the Ministry of Agriculture, Land, and Fisheries; Green Market Santa Cruz; NAMDEVCO; the Network of Rural Women Producers; Tri-Valley Cluster; Tobago URP; Vision on Mission; and the Tobago Agricultural Society.
In designing the programme’s targets, Dickson said there was a focus on aligning them with the country’s key national priorities on addressing food and nutrition security as stated in the government of Trinidad and Tobago’s Vision 2030 strategic framework.
Prior to planning any training activities, local stakeholder groups were consulted to get a sense of what areas they needed training in.
For example, the programme’s field coordinator Dr Lorraine Waldropt-Ferguson said some stakeholders asked for training in making flour using local provisions given the recent increase in flour prices.
She said the process also revealed other needs to help stakeholders create more sustainable business models:
“Engaging them at first, they thought they knew what their needs were because they expressed certain needs to us in terms of what areas they wanted training in. But upon engaging them further, we learnt their business models better, and we were able to recommend things that they needed which they were not aware they needed.”
She added, “We were able to give them suggestions which they accepted, and we were able to build a certain level of trust amongst them. They expressed trust in our capacity to assist them.”
Overall, Prof Ganpat said the initiative was designed to empower stakeholders and ensure that they were self-reliant using their available resources, and to build sustainability into their enterprises. In the long-term, he said, the programme’s networking will help them have access to different resources and knowledge sources around the world.
Coming out from the project, he shared that one local volunteer will be going abroad soon on a study tour.
Dickson added, “We don’t know what our relationship will look like going forward. But we know that we want to maintain the relationships. So, there have been discussions about maybe having study abroad classes where we mix UWI students with Purdue students.”
As part of her duties, local volunteer Adanna Piggott worked alongside a volunteer from the US to train stakeholders from Vision on Mission, Tobago URP, and the Tobago Agricultural Society.
Piggott stated that the trainees were excited and receptive to the training provided.
She said, “It was the first time that many of them engaged with someone from an international background to offer training for free. They were also happy with the model of the programme where they were able to tell us what they needed training in.”
Some of the training activities Piggott did with her group included record management, aquaponics, urban farming, commercial sheep and goat production, pest management, and alternative production methods.
In all, she facilitated ten training activities with clients in both Trinidad and Tobago.
Ultimately, Piggott said the programme was a good opportunity, and it was something which helped stakeholders become more aware of different and new ways to do things, especially in developing a more business-centred approach to activities.
