By Sherry Manning | Executive Director
Friends of ENCA Farm is thrilled to share the news that we will be conducting the first Seed School in the Philippines next week on Thursday, December 3rd. After a number of meeting’s with our various partners here, we are excited to launch this program in collaboration with the Local Government Unit of the Municipality of Tublay, the Tublay Organic Farming Practitioners Association (TOFPA), and LaTrinidad Organic Farming Practitioners Association. We are anticipating between 30-50 farmers will attend this initial program.
The Seed School program will be adapted from its original form created and facilitated by our partners at the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance in Denver last August. I attended this training and am looking forward to facilitating the program here in the Philippines.
This initial training will empower local farmers to adopt seed saving practices. As part of the Seed School, Friends of ENCA thanks to your generous donations will provide seeds to farmers in exchange for their participation in the Seed School training. These initial seeds will serve as a first-round control group to track the farmers’ progress in growing the seeds, selling the produce, and saving the next round of seeds. Each farmer that receives the seeds will be an active participant in the monitoring of their progress and will engage in farmer-to-farmer learning to share successes and challenges with one another.
Other Outputs of this Initial Training:
- Participating farmers will start a member-owned organic seed bank cooperative (co-op) that creates rules, bylaws, conditions of membership, and marketing and promotion. Members of the seed saving co-op will have the following benefits: ability to barter and trade seeds, discounted admission to educational training and programs, voting power for governing policies and structures of the co-op, and access to collective marketing and sales assistance of seeds and produce to local and regional markets.
- Start a seed library for farmers to trade and store seeds. Physical seed library will be constructed in 2017.
- Farmers will start a social enterprise business selling organic seeds.
- Identify the additional educational training’s farmer’s desire. Programs may include: basic farm bookkeeping, program/project management, financial management, crop keeping and tracking records.
We will share another update once the Seed School is completed. You can also read updates about our work on the ground via the Friends of ENCA Farm Blog: https://friendsofencafarm.wordpress.com/.
Thank you for your continued support of our programs in the Philippines!
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