“BBC World Service,” he deepened his voice to sound like a broadcaster. Each night he listened carefully, mimicking the words of the announcer.

These nightly practice sessions came in handy because today he works as a country program manager for Farm Radio International — a Canadian-based non-profit organization that works in partnership with around more than 400 radio broadcasters throughout Africa.

He speaks mostly Swahili on air, but speaking English has allowed him to travel and share the stories of Farm Radio International.

“In Africa we have a shortage of extension experts, especially in rural areas,” he said in a recent interview. “So this is where we think radio comes in so handy because you can use what extension experts you have on air and deliver the same messages that would be done by so many other experts.”

Farm Radio International, which was formed in 1979 by the late CBC broadcaster George Atkins, creates programming for farmers throughout the 38 African countries it serves, tailoring content for each area depending on the agro-ecological zone.

Listening in

Programs, covering everything from crop production, to nutrition, farm safety, HIV/AIDS, and biosecurity, reach a huge number of farmers.

Though they don’t know the total number of farmers yet that they reach, according to Emmanuel, they know at least 2.2 million farmers in Uganda, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Malawi alone listen to Farm Radio.

To illustrate the impact of the programming he tells the story of a cassava farmer in one of the villages in the southern part of Tanzania. Her husband was largely absent and she was raising five children while trying to make enough money to feed, clothe and send them to school.

“There were so many challenges she was facing,” said Emmanuel.

She struggled to get decent yields from her cassava plants, which were growing slowly and often attacked by diseases. She often couldn’t bring in as much money as she needed to provide for her family.

So she contacted the broadcaster from her area, saying she was looking for a more resilient, productive cassava variety. The local broadcaster, a Farm Radio partner, connected her with a research institute that provided her with better-quality cuttings.

“Radio remains a reliable, cheap way to give information,” said Emmanuel. “It creates dialogue and brings governments to the equation. Radio is another platform where voices of farmers can be heard by policy-makers.”

Two way

Of course radio can only communicate information one way. So Farm Radio started a phone service that cultivates information provided by farmers. Farmers are encouraged to register their cellphone numbers and respond to a list of questions so broadcasters can analyze the information and change their programming accordingly.

Farmers can use this number to communicate what they heard that benefited them and what they would like to hear more about.

“Different challenges are faced in each area,” he said. “We design programs around relevant issues.”

Farm Radio also hosts a number that farmers can call to learn up-to-date details on the weather along with information on how this affects their farming practices.

Being able to communicate and receive input from farmers is a great way to find stories, said Emmanuel.

When he later visited the farm of the woman from the village in southern Tanzania he found that life had improved substantially for her. She had brought the cassava cuttings home and once the new cuttings produced strong cassava plants and good yields for her, she started selling cuttings from her plants to the other farmers.

“I asked her what she does with that extra money and she said, ‘Japhet, I have five kids. I need to buy clothes, I need to buy food, I need to send them to school,’” he said.

“That’s the kind of story that moves me when I meet these farmers.”

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“I’m a born farmer,” says Fomba. “Thankfully, it allows me to help my parents.”

Already an experienced poultry farmer, Fomba lacked the means to expand his project to build a modern chicken coop. The Daba Kamalen project provided him with the tools he needed to build a new coop for his chickens and get their eggs off the ground. But in order to build his new coop, he needed advice and funding to build it to government regulation.

Radio Fanaka recorded every aspect of the coop’s construction from the breaking of ground to the fabrication of clay bricks to make the walls. The Daba Kamalen project allowed Fomba to gain a lot of experience raising poultry, experience that he is willing to share with the young people around him.

One particular breeding rooster he brought into his operation, a Wassaché, nearly doubled his egg production. This gained so much attention on the radio documentary series that a group of young poultry farmers came to see him to learn more about the rooster and to form an association to share ideas.

“If I succeed there’ll be a chicken for each person in Mali,” says Fomba. “A chicken per Malian, that’s my goal!”

Watch the original video on YouTube.

Diakaridia Fomba is a contestant in Farmquest, a “radio reality” series sponsored by Farm Radio International, a Canadian organization that works with African radio stations to deliver extension information to farmers. Each of the six contestants submitted a business plan for a farm operation, and each was featured in a series on Radio Fanaka. The winner receives a cash prize to help start his or her new farm venture.

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Some of the difficulties Traoré faced in the past were access to seeds and traveling to neighbouring villages to sell her produce. But for her new endeavour, Traoré faces an unfortunately familiar challenge: gender inequality.

Traoré’s father-in-law disagrees with her starting a professional garden as it will reduce the young mother’s time for the family farm. Traoré does not stand alone. She has the support of local advisors in the Daba Kamalen project and other women who see this as an opportunity to help build a future for local women.

Traoré sums up her participation in the project by sharing a sentiment that can be applied to anyone in any part of the world – “It makes me happy to do something I enjoy.”

• More from the FarmQuest Project: Mamadou Diarra

Watch the original video on YouTube.

Salimata Traoré is a contestant in Farmquest, a “radio reality” series sponsored by Farm Radio International, a Canadian organization that works with African radio stations to deliver extension information to farmers. Each of the six contestants submitted a business plan for a farm operation, and each was featured in a series on Radio Fanaka. The winner receives a cash prize to help start his or her new farm venture.

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For the Daba Kamalen project, Diarra has been given a one-hectare field from his father to grow corn for seed for the market. Government controls every aspect of seed production and he needs to be certified before planting a single corn seed. Diarra will get fertilizer and equipment to aid in his success, but like any other producer, he relies heavily on the weather. As a wind kicks up and soil and dust take to the air, will the weather provide him with enough rain to have a successful corn crop?

Click here to view the original video.

• More from the FarmQuest project: Awa Doumbia

Mamadou Diarra is a contestant in Farmquest, a “radio reality” series sponsored by Farm Radio International, a Canadian organization that works with African radio stations to deliver extension information to farmers. Each of the six contestants submitted a business plan for a farm operation, and each was featured in a series on Radio Fanaka. We’ll feature each over the next few weeks. The winner receives a cash prize to help start his or her new farm venture.

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Termites were also rife in the soil and Doumbia would need a pesticide to help her peanut crop succeed.

As a certified peanut seed producer, Doumbia’s peanut crop is also closely monitored by agronomists and her local advisor is always on hand to help her solve problems. Will Doumbia’s first peanut crop provide her with enough capital to recuperate startup costs and earn a profit? Click here to view the original video.

• More from the FarmQuest project: Kafuné Mariko

Awa Doumbia is a contestant in Farmquest, a “radio reality” series sponsored by Farm Radio International, a Canadian organization that works with African radio stations to deliver extension information to farmers. Each of the six contestants submitted a business plan for a farm operation, and each was featured in a series on Radio Fanaka. We’ll feature each over the next few weeks. The winner receives a cash prize to help start his or her new farm venture.

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Having no goats of her own, Mariko’s local advisor gave her a gift of two goats to start her herd. The village chief also gave Mariko a billy goat, and now her herd is poised to grow fast as several of the females are pregnant. Click here to view the original video.

• More from the FarmQuest project: Fanto Samake

Mariko is a contestant in Farmquest, a “radio reality” series sponsored by Farm Radio International, a Canadian organization that works with African radio stations to deliver extension information to farmers. Each of the six contestants submitted a business plan for a farm operation, and each was featured in a series on Radio Fanaka. We’ll feature each over the next few weeks. The winner receives a cash prize to help start his or her new farm venture.

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For instance, he can only milk his cows in the rainy season because there isn’t enough grazing pasture for them to produce enough milk during the dry season. In order to maintain his operation, Samake’s biggest challenge is finding a way to increase milk production so he can sell more to the dairy. Click here to view the original video.

• More from the Manitoba Co-operator: Keeping young people on the farm – in Mali

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Young farmers were invited to submit ideas for an innovative new farm business idea for the FarmQuest project, and six finalists were chosen. For six months, each week journalists from Radio Fanaka visited the contestants to record their progress. Contestants had advice from government agronomists and assistance in developing a business plan for their farming venture. Local performers composed original songs for each contestant, and the music was used in a “radio reality” broadcast about each one.

• From the Country Guide website: The power to help Africa

The contestants are:

• Kafuné Mariko, 20, a young mother whose project was to raise goats for milk and cheese production.
• Fanto Samake, 18, who has one cow and submitted a project to increase his cattle production.
• Awa Doumbia, 27, a mother of four who wants to grow peanuts.
• Diakaridia Fomba, 35, who had left his village for a larger town but wants to return and start poultry and egg production.
• Mamadou Diarra, 26, who has just returned to his region and wants to grow corn.
• Salimata Traoré, 32. Her father-in- law has thwarted her efforts to farm but she wants to start a market garden.

The video below introduces the project and the contestants. Future videos will focus on each contestant.

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In some ways their situation is similar to that of Prairie homesteaders early in the last century, who also relied on hand tools and animal power. But, thanks to the work of a Canadian organization, Ugandan farmers have an advantage over the Prairie pioneers — an opportunity to learn better farming techniques through the medium of radio.

Farm Radio International (FRI) was founded in 1979 by CBC farm broadcaster George Atkins. While on a tour in Africa, he discovered broadcasters were providing information on topics such as how to replace spark plugs on tractors — good information if you own a tractor, which most Ugandan farmers don’t. When Atkins returned to Canada he started preparing scripts that contained information relevant to the challenges and problems faced by African smallholder farmers.

FRI senior consultant David Mowbray manages communications and training programs. He said that because Ugandan radio agriculture programming in the 1970s was so out of touch with smallholder farmers, they stopped listening and clung to the practices and myths handed down through the generations.

Atkins developed a “participatory” format — interview local farmers about the topic, back up their stories with expert knowledge, then facilitate a dialogue between the on-air people and the listeners.

Mowbray said the format still works today.

“We tell real stories… that’s a winning formula all over the world,” he said. “We know farmers need to hear from a farmer they trust.” In Uganda that’s farmers who work the soil with a hoe and harvest the crop with a machete, he added.

Training the trainers

Today FRI has 500 radio station partners in 38 African countries, and while it continues to provide regular scripts on improved farming practices, it’s working with African broadcasters to train them on how to provide relevant radio programming for farmers.

Askebir Gebru, country director at the FRI Uganda office, explained the approach over a cup of tea at a Kampala hotel.

“We train trainers, we don’t hire them,” he said. In Uganda FRI has provided training to 10 radio stations which broadcast in six languages in 13 districts, Gebru said.

Women farmers

In a good year, Ugandan farmers can feed their immediate family and have some produce left over to sell to middlemen who travel the main roads buying food for the city markets. This money goes to provide clothing, medical care and an education for the children. The Ugandan government does not supply medical care and public school opportunities are limited.

A trip to a local farmers’ group demonstrated how the FRI radio programming format impacts their lives.

It took almost an hour to travel the washed-out roads to the 10-acre farm owned by Agness Kalya, chair of the Zibulatudde Katente farmers’ group, about 30 kms from dusty downtown Kampala. The group is made up mainly of women working on small farms. Mowbray said women provide 60 per cent of the agricultural labour in Uganda.

Kalya is responsible for recording the weekly agriculture broadcast on a portable radio supplied by FRI to share with the group when they meet on Sunday. Then she facilitates a group discussion about the week’s topic.

Paschal Mweruka from the Ugandan office of FRI, the guide and interpreter for the day, said the Katente group is particularly active in promoting crops that improve family health and increase farm income.

In October, eight women in the Katente group were guests on a local radio program. They performed a song they wrote to promote the health benefits of orange-fleshed sweet potatoes (OSP) and how to grow them.

OSP is rich in vitamin A and grows well in the local soil. A single vine clipping, something else Kalya and the other women sell at market, can produce up to 12 kilograms of OSP. That’s 24 to 36 kg of nutrition per year in just one hill of potatoes. That goes a long way towards feeding the 14 people that make up Kalya’s family.

Mweruka said it wasn’t easy to convince local male farmers to grow the vitamin-rich crop, despite evidence that vitamin A deficiency causes blindness and contributes to early childhood deaths. The myth that OSP caused sterility in men was deeply embedded in the local culture, which reveres large families. So how did the women, in a male-dominated culture, change the men’s attitude?

Mweruka said radio played an important role. The local station, a recipient of FRI training, developed a program to dispel the myth. They invited a farmer who grows and eats OSP and had fathered several children to talk about the financial success of the crop. They invited a medical doctor to talk about the benefits of vitamin A and provide scientific evidence that OSP did not cause sterility or impotence. Then they opened up the phone lines so listeners could ask questions.

The women in the Katente group said as they learn more about farming through the radio broadcasts and gain peer support, they feel empowered. They believe they can talk knowledgeably about the OSP crop and teach other farmers how to grow it.

Kalya said she’s planning to clear another part of an acre next year to plant more OSP. She’s calculated that effort will provide 500,000 Ugandan shillings (C$210) in revenue over the year and after input costs she’ll be left with 250,000 shillings, an amount equal to the salary of a local preschool teacher.

A visit to a second group, Del Agro Business Enterprises Limited, showed how the women are embracing farming as a business, not just a means to feed their family. They’ve developed an agro-tourism site with a hostel to increase their income and fund community development.

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It would be easy to spin a doomsday scenario from the conclusions of a recently released report on the world s ability to feed its growing population with diminishing resources.

The Global Food and Farming Futures project, undertaken by the U.K. government under its Foresight program, consulted with 400 leading experts and stakeholders from 35 countries in an effort to highlight the decisions policy-makers must start making to fairly and sustainably feed a world population of nine billion by 2050.

The project looked at five key areas: balancing future supply and demand sustainably, food price stability, ensuring fair access to food, managing the food system s impact on climate, and maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem health.

In a nutshell, its chief conclusion was that we re failing rather miserably at the moment. It s apparent the system is not coping particularly well with these pressures, says lead expert specialist James Muir, an international development and research advisor with the University of Stirling in Scotland. We are at the point where we have to make some difficult decisions.

If we don t think about things now, we are going to lose the game, he said.

Yet Muir said the message emerging from the process is strangely one of hope. This is a good time for action, he said. We are generally capable of using our knowledge effectively to make change.

Muir was in Canada last week addressing the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists congress in Niagara Falls as part of a panel discussion into the elements of the sustainability story that journalists might be missing.

Those of us who live and breath agriculture are fully aware of the role technology and in particular, genetics, will continue to play in achieving productivity increases. But most of us are also aware in varying degrees that feeding the world in 2050 can t be accomplished by solely focusing on yield increases. There are also issues of environmental decline, equitable access, waste reduction, and trade policy, to name a few.

Yet the feed the world discussion has largely been dominated by the production challenge. The private sector research and development companies are sometimes criticized for co-opting the agenda, but to their credit, they are at least doing something about their part of the solution.

The rest of us, from international governments right on down to individual consumers who throw out upwards of 50 per cent of their food purchases, have exercised a large measure of inertia perhaps even denial of our role in finding solutions.

Politicians are happy to talk about the production challenge, which is something for someone else to address. They are much less vocal about the availability challenge, which is a broader discussion and one that puts the food file back on their desk.

Speakers at the IFAJ conference were asked to flesh out some of the issues of food availability and sustainability that don t get as much coverage and offer some insights into the media s role in this equation.

A radical redesign of the global food system is required, Muir said. We need to redefine the agro-ecological context.

At the core of this is a need to end across-the-board budget cuts that are responsible for reducing investments in publicly funded research to between one and 1.5 per cent of GDP from historical levels of three to five per cent, he said.

Also critical is developing a can-do culture that empowers individuals to take action and make changes in everyday ways, rather than portraying the issues as being so large and insurmountable that they tower above our capacity to act.

Soil scientist Jill Clapperton appealed to delegates to find and tell the stories of farmers who are incorporating sustainable agriculture into their business plans so other farmers can learn from their example. That was echoed by Kevin Perkins, executive director of Farm Radio International, who noted the media is the means by which good ideas can be scaled up into widespread practices.

But Clapperton said sustainable agriculture solutions will be different for farmers in different parts the world. One size fits no one, she said. To manage soils, we have to understand culture.

For example, tractors are of less value than oxen in some regions. In cultures where cattle are currency, giving people genetics that will increase the size of their herds could prove environmentally disastrous unless it is accompanied by improved strategies for grazing management, she said.

And a focus on nutrition must supercede the drive for more calories. Are we just producing a whole bunch of calories versus are we producing food that is good for us?

Feeding the world sustainable is not an insurmountable problem. It s a choice we have to make. laura@fbcpublishing.com

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