Growing Knowledge & Building Partnerships

I've been back Stateside for a few days after spending 2 weeks traveling through Jamaica teaching Top Bar Hive Beekeeping, Treatment Free Beekeeping, Queen Rearing and Beeswax Products through the Partners of the America's Farmer to Farmer Program. Top bar model apiary at Yerba Buena Farm in St. Mary In a nutshell, I taught 152 beekeepers on Top Bar Hives and Sustainable Beekeeping from one end of Jamaica to the other, in Kingston, Westmoreland, Bartons, St. Thomas, St. Mary and Portland. Jamaica has banned the importation of beeswax to the country, so they can't make enough beeswax to support the foundation needed for Langstroth hives. Each apiary is suggested to have 10% Top Bar hives, solely for wax production, but nobody knows how to use this style of hive yet! I was there continuing the education of previous trainers, New Mexico's own Les Crowder and Megan Mahoney! Tom Hebert from Honduras has also participated in the program. J essie's Top 9 Te

Partners of the Americas Farmer to Farmer Program intern Sebastian Insfran is working on a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) project with program information from Haiti and the DR. GIS is a way to visualize, analyze, interpret, and understand data to show relationships, patterns, and trends. Specifically, he was looking at the island of Hispaniola and comparing regional information on childhood malnutrition, maps of  Farmer to Farmer  project sites, and maps showing the number of hosts in these places. The goals is to visualize the presence of   Farmer to Farmer as it relates with some food security and agricultural development indicators, through spatial data analysis. Some samples maps are below: The visualization of  Farmer to Farmer  host organizations’ location was one of the main goals of his  assignment and he used several tools to create maps that showed the data.  While the project is still underway, and there are some data limitations, it is interesting to see

Dr. Thomas Evans recently presented a case study on integrated pest and disease management at the 69th Annual Meeting of the Potomac Division of the American Phytopathological Society held in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.  The findings presented by Dr. Evans were based on his team's Farmer to Farmer trips to the Dominican Republic's Constanza valley. Dr. Evans is a professor of plant pathology at the University of Delaware and his teammate Dr. Keil is a professor of Enthomology at the Catholic University of Ecuador, South America.  They have worked together on eight volunteer assignments in the Dominican Republic since 2008.  A final F2F assignment is planned for May 2013 where part of their agenda includes a Tomato Spotted Wilt Tospovirus (TSWV)/ Thrips Summit meeting with key packers and growers in the Constanza Valley. The findings presented in West Virginia will serve as a framework for the planned Summit meeting. Google Earth Map identifying the location of the Consta

Information and communication technologies (ICT) can play an important role in agricultural development, particularly in helping address the need for technical training, knowledge about markets, advertising, and more. ICT can help improve the livelihoods of farmers as well as the overall efficiency of agricultural sectors in developing countries. Partners has increased the use of ICT tools in the Farmer to Farmer (F2F) program and is seeing results. Videos, for example, have been developed to help promote the products or work of host organizations, or serve as agricultural training tools. Information management specialists have helped universities develop library and catalog systems to better train students. And F2F currently has someone using a geographic information system (GIS) to map country projects against sub-regional data on stats like malnutrition to see how the program relates to poverty levels. As video has been a popular tool, below are some links to current and past