Growing Knowledge & Building Partnerships

Jim Crandall training new entrepreneurs. Small business development is a multi-dimensional and fluid process. In Haiti, programs like F2F and Makouti Agro-Enterprise support farmers in establishing a production system – an essential component to starting a business. By providing person-to-person, hands-on training, F2F and Makouti contribute to increasing producers’ chances of success. In addition to a healthy, efficient production system, a business needs a business plan to guide decisions about facilities, production, and marketing, with an eye towards profitability and long-term sustainability. This past June, F2F volunteer Jim Crandall applied his experience in cooperative business development to assist producer networks in Haiti. His focus was on enabling producers to make business decisions based on the network as a whole, not just on individuals. Jim spent his first week in the Port-au-Prince area working specifically with two rabbit producer associations. He led sessi...

F2F volunteer Dr. Robert Paull of the University of Hawaii at Manoa Huila, 1 of Colombia’s 32 departments, is recognized nationally for its tropical fruit industry. Located in the country’s southwest region, Huila boasts 25 tropical fruit species spanning 10,699 hectares (26,438 acres), and is Colombia’s number 1 producer of passion fruit and pineapple. That said, Huila’s fruit industry is currently performing below the national average, considered to be the result of a lack of direct assistance and improved technologies at the producer level. To address this issue, Colombia’s National Learning Service (SENA) has linked up with Farmer to Farmer to facilitate collaboration among U.S. tropical fruit specialist, Dr. Robert Paull, SENA instructors, and Huila’s fruit producers. Dr. Paull, Chairman of the Department of Tropical Plant & Soil Science at the  University of Hawaii at Manoa, has been in Huila since September 8th to learn about tropical fruit produ...

In November of last year, Farmer-to-Farmer Volunteer Matthias Resien had taken a trip to Leticia, Colombia to provide training to staff at the Amazon World Ecological Park regarding dehydration techniques for making teas, packaging them, and developing marketing strategies. The park, which opened in 2011 and is known for its sustainable use of biodiversity, has many different species of aromatic plants that have large potential in the tea market, particularly for tourists visiting the park. Matthias’s visit was essential in getting the business started by helping to build a drying structure at the park and showing how to blend different herbs for aromatic teas that will be sold. Today, almost one year later, park staff are now selling tea to visitors and are in the process of expanding their market even more. They continue to make improvements to the drying house to adapt to local environmental conditions and create a stronger structure. In the future, they are looking into desi...

Rabbits are a good source of nutrition and income for smallholder Haitian farmers Long-time Farmer-to-Farmer (F2F) Volunteer Myriam Kaplan-Pasternak recently returned from her fifteenth trip to Haiti in seven years. As a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from California, Myriam has had a unique volunteer experience in that she’s been able to follow the progression of the rabbit industry in Haiti, with rabbit meat becoming increasingly accepted on a larger scale as a viable source of nutrition and income for smallholder farmers. When Myriam first started volunteering with F2F in Haiti in 2006, there were fewer than 100 rabbit producers in the country, and only one of them was also eating the rabbits she raised. Today, with the help of F2F and Makouti Agro-Enterprise, this number has grown to over 1,000 producers with almost all raising rabbits for both personal consumption and sale. Boiling and mixing cassava to include in rabbit feed blocks Myriam’s most recent visit to Hait...