By Joanne Schante | Director
Namasté!
Thank you for being our very first donators and supporters of the ScaleSchool in Nepal! Two months have rolled from the end of our crowdfunding campaign and we have been in action to train the selected farmers in Nepal. The Agro-team finished their hard work onsite at the farm to build the courses with Sudarshan, which he has been carrying out in the past 2 months. Just this past Thursday he gave the training course number 7, and until now many crucial topics, such as solid heap compost, crop management and rotation, crop association and record keeping, have been taught in the form of theory and practical workshops. Sudarshan has started to visit the farmers to see and talk about their individual progress and plans.
The farmers have been so enthusiastic and positive about the courses so far, that they are pushing Sudarshan to speed up and give 2 full-day courses a week instead of one. That’s really admirable commitment! While their daily life goes on at the same time as the training and some absences may occur, the system has taken off really well : the trainees will go for peer-to-peer advice if they missed a course and solicit Sudarshan only after. Together with Sudarshan, the farmers have started plans for the shop where their organic (in process) produce will be sold with transparency already by November 2019. A strong milestone that the trainees are determined to achieve.
With the funds raised in our crowdfunding campaign we have provided record keeping books, notebooks for writing notes from the classes but also own observations at the farm, calculators to help with the math. Sudarshan is getting the drums for liquid compost as we speak and worms for the vermicompost for when the farmers have their compost ready for the worms (if too early they might die). The irrigation systems and trees are to be planted after the farmers have confirmed long-term plans for their farms. Also the Spiral Farm House, functioning as a training farm was enhanced with the planting of nut and fruit trees as well as with vermi- and liquid compost units. The farmers target to harvest their first new organic crops and sell them at the nearby town within just a couple of months, the organic farmer shop will be in our next investment priority.
We are publishing regular updates on our social media, so if you want to stay tuned, follow us on facebook and instagram! If you have any questions or comments to us, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team! We seek to work with more partners, so any collaboration ideas are most welcome too!
The project is planned for the long term: this first step of the training will start a chain reaction whereby the first trainees will train other farmers and so on. Our crowdfunding is now open on an ongoing basis, so if you (or your friends!) wish to continue to support us, you can still do it. Stable funding will help us to maximize the impact for larger group of farmers in the years to come. Monthly donations, how big or small, will help us to predict the capacity to act on the field.
Best wishes from the Open Team, the Spiral Farm House and all our motivated volunteers across Nepal and Europe !
Sonja, Sudarshan, Subodh, Juliette, Lucinne, Aude, Judy, Tim, Aurélie, Elise, Elodie, Joanne and Sokha
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