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The agricultural project in the southern Philippines was originally designed to help poor subsistence farmers improve their livelihoods. But it has gone far beyond this humble aim to become a classic example of a new style of scientific research.

Called participatory research, the approach involves farmers in the research process at a basic, decision-making level, and recognizes that their knowledge and experience can assist the process. The results have not only improved the lives of the farmers, but have also equipped them with a new understanding of their natural resources in the upland environment.

The Forages for Smallholders Project, coordinated by the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture and financed by the Asian Development Bank (ADB), followed decades of research on forage technologies that had aroused little interest among farmers. A group of researchers wrote: “The lack of linkages between technology development on research stations and technology adoption on farms has often resulted in research programs developing technologies that offer few, if any, solutions to the major problems faced by farmers.”

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New Technologies Spreading Rapidly

The problem the scientists were trying to overcome was fundamental and widespread: despite the economic importance of ruminant livestock to resource-poor farmers in the uplands of Southeast Asia, traditional sources of forages were poor and dwindling. Feeding their cattle or buffaloes required many more hours per day than the farmers could afford. The situation was keeping millions of poor rural families in poverty.

Launched 7 years ago with funding from the Australian Agency for International Development, the Forages for Smallholders Project adopted a new approach. First, the Project’s researchers identified a variety of robust, broadly adapted forage species—including grasses, legumes, and trees—that they regarded as basic building blocks for promising new farm technologies. Then, in collaboration with national agricultural extension services and local authorities, the researchers encouraged farmer groups to evaluate these building blocks by experimenting with them to create forage systems suited to their farms and conditions. The underlying principle was to give farmers ingredients and information, not recipes.

Working in People’s Republic of China, Indonesia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam, scientists found that their first challenge was to overcome farmers’ widespread fear that, by sowing forages, they were simply planting weeds in an already difficult farming environment. But the farmers persevered. And the new forage technologies are now not only succeeding but are also spreading rapidly.

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Providing Feed, Protecting the Soil

The upland farming communities in the municipality of Malitbog in Bukidnon Province, Mindanao, are an example of how the poor farmers’ ingenuity is giving direction to research.

The Malitbog village of San Migara, at 980 meters above sea level, clings to a ridge in the midst of a rolling landscape of degraded forestland. The area was clear-felled by loggers in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving a vast tract of poor, acidic soil on which a legion of farmers struggles. Their main crop is maize.

Most San Migara families own two cattle and use them as draft animals, mainly to haul plows around the steep hillside fields. Before the project intervention, many of their animals were in poor condition and had low reproductive performance. Farmers commonly spent up to 4 hours every day either leading their animals to feed or cutting fodder to carry home. Hungry animals often grazed toxic ferns—and suffered the consequences.

Getting New Grasses into the Fields

The Project first offered the farmers of San Migara 12 forage species, mainly grasses with a few leguminous trees thrown in. The farmers visited evaluation sites to see the crops growing and were invited to choose one of the forages to try on their own farms. Most chose to experiment with grass species, such as Setaria sphacelata cv. Solander, Pennisetum purpureum accessions and hybrids, and Panicum maximum T-58.

A variety of cropping methods was also suggested, including plots for cut-and-carry feeding to tethered animals, plots for grazing, and live fences or hedgerows. Another option was to use the forage species as ground cover for annual crops and fruit trees, or to control erosion.

Surprisingly, in an environment with heavy rainfall and very little level ground, erosion was not widely recognized as a problem.

Soon after the farmers began growing the forage species, two beneficial effects became obvious. First, according to the local field worker, Willie Nacalaban, the health of the farmers’ livestock distinctly improved. Their reproductive performance is now high enough to allow the use of artificial insemination in raising the genetic quality of their offspring.

Farmer Jimmy Jasmin said that previously he spent 4 hours every day providing food for his animals. Now he needs only half an hour to gather enough fodder from nearby fields to satisfy his livestock.

The second benefit was more substantial than the first—and rather unexpected. The farming community of San Migara has developed an intense interest in the effects of erosion on its sloping fields. Elsewhere, most farmers experimenting with the forage species preferred to grow them in plots for cutting and carrying to tethered or penned animals. In San Migara and other villages in Malitbog, the farmers opted for planting the forage grasses in contour hedgerows across their hillside maize fields.

In many fields the loose red soil is now forming natural terraces against the hedgerows, despite the grass being regularly cut to feed livestock. Contributing most to the popularity of the system is that the grass hedgerows retain fertilizer, rather than allowing it to wash away with runoff. Soil nutrients are slowly accumulating.

Farmer Aureo Bitacura put a figure to the benefit. "Before the hedgerows, I put the same amount of fertilizer on my fields for every crop. Now, the need for fertilizer is reduced on the second and subsequent crops. My fertilizer input has been halved."

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Spreading the Benefits

A sign of success is the high demand for planting materials. The word is spreading, with more and more farmers—both local and distant—keen on planting forage crops. Grass species Setaria sphacelata has become very popular. When grown in hedgerows, it does not shade crops planted nearby, and it is easily propagated from root cuttings.

The multiple benefits the farmers have reaped from the forage species focused their attention on learning new technologies and the management of natural resources. They have formed an association to pursue crop and tree technologies with the aim of making their farming systems sustainable.

In the high fields of Malitbog, the Forages for Smallholders Project has now been joined by researchers from another organization, the International Center for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF), based in Nairobi, Kenya. Together, the researchers have established experimental plots on the San Migara hillsides to measure soil loss through erosion, changes in soil quality, and improvements in crop yields as a result of forage hedgerows.

Although the researchers’ wider aim is to carry proof of benefits to hundreds of thousands of poor upland farmers in Southeast Asia, the farmers of San Migara have adopted a new and ambitious attitude toward their future. ICRAF researchers have established a fruit tree nursery, and their involvement has brought a new interest in fruit tree crops and forest regeneration.

"Ten to 15 years from now, the soil improvement will be clear and obvious," Mr. Nacalaban says. "We’re working on a means of establishing tree legumes in the acid soils up here, so the farmers will soon be growing leguminous trees and fruit trees—such as citrus, durian, and rambutan—in their hedgerows along with the forage species."

"Most importantly, the farming families feel they’ve taken the initiative and have created a really bright future for themselves. They’re optimistic and intent on creating something good for their children to inherit."