COMMUNITY INTEGRATED PEST MANAGEMENT 3(2-1)

Objective: To educate the students on integrated pest management approach at community level.

Theory:

Community IPM basics; Community IPM at farmer’s fields, homes, schools, industrial work places,
office buildings, parks and recreational areas and public property etc. Agro-ecosystem analysis. Field
base diagnostics. Biodiversity conservation. Educational foundations of the farmer field schools
Farmer field experimentation & research. Participatory approach in Community IPM. Non-formal
education, group dynamics and community IPM in Asia. Government policies and their impacts on
community IPM. Curriculum development of training of facilitators (TOF). Women Open School
(WOS) and Children Ecological Clubs(CEC).

Practical:

Visits to Farmer Field School and Insectariums. Farmers field experiments. Collection, identification
and preservation of pests, natural enemies and diseased specimens.

Recommended Books:

1. Duveskog, D. and Friis-Hansen, E. 2008. Farmer Field Schools: a platform for transformative
learning in rural Africa. In “Transformative Learning in Action: Handbook of Practice”, edited by
Mezirow, J. and Taylor, E., Jossey-Bass Press

2. Community IPM. 2005. http://www.communityipm.org/doc

3. IPM-Based Landscape Design. 2005. http://www.efn.org/~ipmpa/D-Mhome.html 4. Fundamentals

of a Low Maintenance, Integrated Pest Management Approach to Landscape Design. 2005.
http://www.efn.org/~ipmpa/des-cnsd.html

5. FAO 2004. Environmental education for poor farmers. FAO-EU IPM Program for cotton in Asia.
FAO Regional office for Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok, Thailand.

6. Van den Berg .2004. Farmer Field Research: An analysis of experiences in Indonesia. FAO
Regional office for Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok, Thailand.

7. Ahmad, I. and Bhutta, A. R. 2004. Text book of Introductory Plant Pathology. Pub. National Book
Foundation, Islamabad, Pakistan.

8. Kazmi, M. R. and R. Zada 2003 . Facilitation Skills: A Resource Book. National IPM Program,
NARC, Islamabad.

9. John Pontius, Russell Dilts, Andrew Bartlett. 2002. From Farmer Field School to Community IPM:
Ten Years of IPM Training in Asia. FAO Community IPM Programme, Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations, Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, 2002

10. Reijntius, J. and Dilts, R. and Bartlett, A. (eds.), 2002. From Farmer field school to community
IPM, Ten years of IPM training in Asia. Published by FAO community IPM Programmes, FAOUN,
Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok, Thailand.

11. CABI Bioscience. 2000 Learning to cut the chemicals in cotton. CABI-Bioscience & PAN UK.
Integrated pest management
Choice for solid science, Sound solutions in dealing with pests. Promote safe, least-toxic
solutions to both pests and pesticide problems.

IPM Basics:

Know your pests: it’s essential to IPM. If you treat for the wrong pest, you waste time and
money. Abiotic problems can mimic pest damage too. Don’t spend money and time on
treatments that don’t work or may damage your operation.

Start to finish, good IPM is based on these seven steps:

• Prepare: Be aware of the potential problems and opportunities at your site. Know
your pests—and keep good records.

• Prevent: Protect your landscape and buildings for the long term.

• Monitor: Scout your landscape and buildings to find out which pests are on your site
or in your space.

• Analyze: Your threshold data will tell you if it’s time to act.

• Manage: Choose among tactics that provide the best balance of economic and
environmental cost and effectiveness while reducing risk.

• Apply: When management is justified, do it right.

• Reevaluate: Look at your results, fine-tune your response—and make proactive plans
for next time.

COMMUNITY IPM DEFINED:

The concept of IPM has long been recognized in agricultural settings as a way to reduce
various risks, prevent pesticide resistance, and optimize the outcomes of pest management
practices. In order to address similar needs of non-agricultural pest management, or pest
management in places other than the production or trade of a commodity, the idea of
Community IPM has been established. Community IPM focuses on the direct interactions
between people and pests with development and delivery of feasible and cost-effective pest
management tools that pose minimal health and environmental risks. The scope includes a
diversity of opportunities, from head lice outbreaks in elementary schools, to pest problems
in hospitals, parks, zoos, and museums, to mitigating wildlife damage to utilities. All
environments where humans live, work and play are part of Community IPM. It is an
expansion of the concept of “urban” pest management that includes non-urban settings, such
as athletic fields in rural towns, as well as homes on farmland.

Traditional agricultural IPM focuses on avoiding dietary intake of and worker exposure to
pesticides, and reducing a range of environmental and economic risks. Community IPM
encompasses pest management in the overall human environment, and in this way overlaps
with agricultural IPM in synergistic ways. Both endeavors promote reducing risks by
monitoring, recordkeeping, and combining pest control techniques in a logical way. Both
involve and affect the public directly, and both aim to protect environmental quality while
reducing economic and human health risks. Community IPM often differs, however, in the
decision-making criteria. Thresholds that stimulate action are commonly based on human
health and comfort, social concerns and aesthetic quality. The impact of community pests,
and tolerance for them, can vary greatly depending on the situation and people involved –
making economic impacts difficult to measure and solutions different from site to site. For
these reasons, public education plays a significant role in communicating the flexibility,
complexities and benefits of Community IPM. By increasing awareness of the risks and
benefits of pesticide use, broadening perception of what pest management includes, and
promoting the idea of functional thresholds and aesthetic tolerance in places such as the
landscape, Community IPM expands public understanding of central issues in agriculture,
especially those at the crossroads of agriculture and community.

How Community IPM Works

• Act upon their own initiative and analysis;

• Identify and resolve relevant problems;
• Conduct their own local IPM programmes that include research and educational
activities;
• Elicit the support of local institutions;
• Establish or adapt local organizations that enhance the influence of farmers in local
decision making;
• Employ problem-solving and decision-making processes that are open and egalitarian;
• Create opportunities for all farmers in their communities to develop themselves and
benefit from their IPM activities; and
• Promote a sustainable agricultural system.

Community IPM basics

• The three basic elements of community IPM are

• Learning,
• Knowledge-generating,
• Organizing
 • The three overlap in practice, but community IPM begins with education at the farmer
field school.
• The next step is the follow-up of the FFS with additional opportunities for farmers to
build their skills.
• These activities further farmers' learning so that they are able to create their own
knowledge through research and to organize groups and activities.
• The goal of post-FFS activities is to enhance the capacities of farmers to create their
own mechanisms to manage their shared resources.
• Community IPM leads to farmer empowerment. It seeks to institutionalize IPM at the
local level by putting farmers in control of the process of planning and implementing
their own IPM programmes.

FARMERS FIELD SCHOOL

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The FFS approach was developed by an FAO project in South East Asia as a way for small-
scale rice farmers to investigate, and learn, for themselves the skills required for, and benefits
to be obtained from, adopting on practices in their paddy fields. The term “Farmers’ Field
School” comes from the Indonesian Sekolah Lampangan meaning simply “field school”. The
first Field Schools were established in 1989 in Central Java during the pilot phase of the
FAO-assisted National IPM Programme. This Programme was prompted by the devastating
insecticide-induced outbreaks of brown plant hoppers (Nilaparvata lugens) that are estimated
to have in 1986 destroyed 20,000 hectares of rice in Java alone. The Government of
Indonesia’s response was to launch an emergency training project aimed at providing
120,000 farmers with field training in IPM, focused mainly on recording on reducing the
application of the pesticides that were destroying the natural insect predators of the brown
plant hopper. The technicalities of rice IPM were refined in 1986 and 1987 and a core
curriculum for, training farmers was developed in 1988 when the National IPM Programme
was launched. It was based not on instructing farmers what to do but on empowering them
through education to handle there own on-farm decisions, using experiential learning
techniques developed for non-formal adult education purposes. Since then, the approach has
been replicated in a variety of settings beyond IPM. The FARM Programme (FAO/UNDP),
for example, has sought to adapt the FFS approach to tackle problems related to integrated
Soil Fertility Management in the Philippines, Vietnam and China. The IFAD/FAO
programme in East Africa has adapted the approach for Integrated Production and pest
Management (IPPM) and poultry production. The Livestock farmers field school programme
by ILRI in Kenya has adapted the approach to dairy production etc. After Asia the FFS
approach has been extended to several countries in Africa and Latin American. At the same
time there has been a shift from a focus on a single constraint of a single crop (IPM for rice
based systems) to an emphasis on the multiple aspects of crop production and management,
to cropping systems, to non crop/forest (livestock production etc) to natural resource
management (Soil fertility, water conservation etc) to Socio-cultural dimensions of
community life (food security &nutrition, savings, health, HIV/AIDS, literacy training,
livelihoods etc). African countries implementing the approach are among others Kenya,
Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Gambia, Egypt,
Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique.

FARMERS FIELD SCHOOL IN PAKISTAN:

Agriculture sector in Pakistan is having a lion share in the economy and contributes about
18.9% to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and provides employment to 42.3% of labor force.
More than 65% of Pakistani population directly and indirectly depends on agriculture for
subsistence. Agriculture sector in Pakistan is also an important source of foreign exchange
earnings and boosts growth in other sectors. (Govt. of Pak, 2020). In Pakistan, Agricultural
Extension services have traditionally been organized as part of the Provincial Ministry of
Agriculture. Several extension models and approaches have been tried since independence,
including the Village Agricultural and Industrial Development Programme (Village-AID
Programme), Basic Democracies System (BDS), Integrated Rural Development Programme
(IRDP) and Inputs at Farmers’ Doorsteps Approach. Based on the linear approach, these
programmes met with limited success and were abandoned one after another. The present
Training and Visit (T & V) programme, while specifically focused on agriculture, also suffers
from inherent inflexibilities, namely the over-reliance on contact farmers to diffuse technical
information to surrounding farmers (Raiz, 2010).

In the 1980s, when the training and visit System was working in the country, an innovative
approach for farmers capacity building started from Indonesia and known as ‘FFS'. In
Pakistan the government policy makers were also converted towards outcome of the FFS
across the globe and different programmes were started based upon FFS in many districts of
Punjab such as the FFS started on cotton crop and for the development in fruits and
vegetables (GOP, 2005).

Pakistan, in contrast to most other Asian FFS programmes, started a pilot program with
cotton IPM-FFS with ADB funding in 1997 (Jiggins et al., 2005). This program was
expanded with the FAO-EU IPM Programme for Cotton in Asia (2000-2004). In 2004 the
two major cotton producing provinces, Sindh and Punjab, have implemented IPM FFSs as the
dominant interface between government and farmers. Policy makers have acknowledged
IPM-FFS as an approach that is able to enlist farmers in rural development programmes.
Therefore, Sindh Province has included FFS expertise in the job description of its agricultural
officers, and Punjab has launched a major programme expansion initiative to conduct 3,500
FFSs in cotton-wheat management over the next 4 years. The FAO-EU Programme helped
establish a strong National IPM Programme, which not only became the joint implementing
unit for the EU and AsDB funded projects, but also addressed pesticide policy issues with
ministerial decision-makers. Despite a powerful pesticide industry, the country has embarked
upon its own National IPM Project that will cover four provinces and last five years and
entirely funded from national and provincial resources. NGOs and international agencies such
as CABI Bioscience, World Wildlife Fund, Caritas, PLAN Pakistan, and local welfare
associations became active partners in the implementation of FFS. To encourage women’s
participation, an AGFUND initiated project on “Pesticide Risk Reduction for Women in
Pakistan” focused on training female facilitators to reach rural women in the traditional,
gender-segregated society through Women Open Schools. Emphasis was on the toxicity and
health risks arise from pesticides, but other elements in the cotton-based farming systems
were also included. Significant social mobilization and empowerment was evident from the
formation of officially registered farmer alumni associations and associations of IPM
facilitators offering facilitation services and farmer club support. CABI introduced and tested
a basic livestock management curriculum in FFS in 2001 with the technical assistance of the
Livestock Extension Department (pers. Comm. Janny Voss).

Govt. of the Punjab chalked out a comprehensive integrated situation plan to increase per
acre production of crops in the province and introduced as innovative approach i.e. Farmers
Field School (FFS) approach. It was introduced by Pakistan Agricultural Research Council
(PARC), Government of Pakistan for cotton Integrated Pest Management (IPM) during 2002
and FFS for Fruit and Vegetables development (F&V) during 2005. This approach was also
adopted by Punjab Government during 2004. In this approach an intensive training has also
been started in last few years across the globe to encourage information and yield
enhancement with less utilize of pesticides for agricultural development (Bajwa et al., 2010).

Under Fruit and Vegetable Development Project, mango, citrus and vegetable growers are
being trained through Farmer Field School (FFS) system by a participatory approach i.e.
learning by Doing. During the early phase of the project 48 mango FFSs, 48 citrus FFSs each
in their 4 respective districts and 81 vegetable FFSs in 12 districts are in operation by the well
trained facilitators.

In Pakistan Farmer Field School concept is without walls where farmers and facilitators
gather on weekly/fortnightly basis to analyze the progress of a crop, learn the biotech
interactions between soil, plants & insects, chart the dynamics of insect population and
finally bring this knowledge together to make informed crop management decision.

APPROACH AND CONCEPT

What is a Farmer Field School? Farmer field schools (FFS) is described as a Platform and
“School without walls” for improving decision making capacity of farming communities and
stimulating local innovation for sustainable agriculture. It is a participatory approach to
extension, whereby farmers are given opportunity to make a choice in the methods of
production through discovery based approach. A Field School is a Group Extension Method
based on adult education methods. It is a “school without walls” that teaches basic agro-
ecology and management skills that make farmers experts in their own farms. It is composed
of groups of farmers who meet regularly during the course of the growing seasons to
experiment as a group with new production options. Typically FFS groups have 25-30
farmers. After the training period, farmers continue to meet and share information, with less
contact with extensionist. FFS aims to increase the capacity of groups of farmers to test new
technologies in their own fields, assess results and their relevance to their particular
circumstances, and interact on a more demand driven basis with the researchers and
extensionists looking to these for help where they are unable to solve a specific problem
amongst themselves. In summary therefore a Farmer Field School (FFS) is a forum where
farmers and trainers debate observations, apply their previous experiences and present new
information from outside the community. The results of the meetings are management
decisions on what action to take. Thus FFS as an extension methodology is a dynamic
process that is practiced and controlled by the farmers to transform their observations to
create a more scientific understanding of the crop / livestock agro-ecosystem. A field school
therefore is a process and not a goal.

Objectives of Field Schools

Broad Objectives

To bring farmers together to carry out collective and collaborative inquiry with the purpose of
initiating community action in solving community problems

Specific Objectives

1. To empower farmers with knowledge and skills to Make them experts in their own fields.
2. To sharpen the farmers’ ability to make critical and informed decisions that render their
farming profitable and sustainable.
3. To sensitize farmers in new ways of thinking and problem solving 4. Help farmers learn
how to organize themselves and their communities

FFS also contribute to the following objective;

1. Shorten the time it takes to get research results from the stations to adoption in farmers’
field by involving farmers experimentation early in the technology development process.

2. Enhance the capacity of extension staff, working in collaboration with researchers, to serve
as facilitators of farmers’ experiential learning. Rather than prescribing blanket
recommendation that cover a wide geographic area but may not be relevant to all farms
within it, the methods train extensionist and researchers to work with farmers in testing,
assessing and adapting a variety of options within their specific local conditions.

3. Increase the expertise of farmers to make informed decisions on what works best for them,
based on their own observations of experimental plots in their Field schools and to explain
their reasoning. No matter how good the researchers and extensions, recommendations must
be tailored and adapted to local conditions, for which local expertise and involvement is
required that only farmers themselves can supply.

4. Establish coherent farmer groups that facilitate the work of research and extension
workers, providing the demand of a demand driven system.

Principles of Farmer Field Schools

In the field school, emphasis is laid on growing crops or raising livestock with the least
disruption on the agro-ecosystem.

The training methodology is based on learning by doing, through discovery, comparison and
a non-hierarchical relationship among the learners and trainers and is carried out almost
entirely in the field.

The four major principles within the FFS process are:

a) Grow a healthy crop
b) Observe fields regularly
c) Conserve natural enemies of crop pests
d) Farmers understand ecology and become experts in their own field

Characteristics of the Farmer Field School Approach

Farmers as Experts

Farmers ‘learn-by-doing’ i.e. they carry out for themselves the various activities related to the
particular farming/forestry practice they want to study and learn about. This could be related
to annual crops, or livestock/fodder production. The key thing is that farmers conduct their
own field studies. Their training is based on comparison studies (of different treatments) and
field studies that they, not the extension/research staff conduct. In so doing they become
experts on the particular practice they are investigating.

The Field is the Learning Place

All learning is based in the field. The maize field, banana plantation, or grazing area is where
farmers learn. Working in small subgroups they collect data in the field, analyze the data,
make action decisions based on they analyses of the data, and present their decisions to the
other farmers in the field school for discussion, questioning and refinement.

Extension Workers as Facilitators Not Teachers

The role of the extension worker is very much that of a facilitator rather than a conventional
teacher. Once the farmers know what it is they have to do, and what it is that they can
observe in he field, the extension worker takes a back seat role, only offering help and
guidance when asked to do so. Presentations during group meetings are the work of the
farmers not the extension worker, with the members of each working group assuming
responsibility for presenting their findings in turn to their fellow farmers. The extension
worker may take part in the subsequent discussion sessions but as a contributor, rather than
leaders, in arriving at an agreed consensus on what action needs to be taken at that time.

Scientists/Subject Matter Specialists Work With Rather than Lecture Farmers:

The role of scientists and subject matter specialists is to provide backstopping support to the
members of the FFS and in so doing to learn to work in a consultative capacity with farmers.
Instead of lecturing farmers their role is that of colleagues and advisers who can be consulted
for advice on solving specific problems, and who can serve as a source of new ideas and/or
information on locally unknown technologies.

The Curriculum is integrated

The curriculum is integrated. Crop husbandry, animal husbandry, horticulture, land

husbandry are considered together with ecology, economics, sociology and education to form
a holistic approach. Problems confronted in the field are the integrating principle.

Training Follows the Seasonal Cycle

Training is related to the seasonal cycle of the practice being investigated. For annual crops
this would extend from land preparation to harvesting. For fodder production would include
the dry season to evaluate the quantity and quality at a time of year when livestock feeds are
commonly in short supply. For tree production, and conservation measures such as
hedgerows and grass strips, training would need to continue over several years for farmers to
see for themselves the full range of costs and benefits.

Regular Group Meetings

Farmers meet at agreed regular intervals. For annual crops such meetings may be every 1 or 2
weeks during the cropping season. For other farm/forestry management practices the time
between each meeting would depend on what specific activities need to be done, or be related
to critical periods of the year when there are key issues to observe and discuss in the field.

Learning Materials are Learner Generated

Farmers generate their own learning materials, from drawings of what they observe, to the
field trials themselves. These materials are always consistent with local conditions, are less
expensive to develop, are controlled by the learners and can thus be discussed by the learners
with others. Learners know the meaning of the materials because they have created the
materials. Even illiterate farmers can prepare and fuse simple diagrams to illustrate the points
they want to make.

Group Dynamics/Team Building

Training includes communication skills building, problem solving, leadership and discussion
methods. Farmers require these skills. Successful activities at the community level require
that farmers can apply effective leadership skills and have the ability to communicate their
findings to others. Farmer Field Schools are conducted for the purpose of creating a learning
environment in which farmers can master and apply specific land management skills. The
emphasis is on empowering farmers to implement their own decisions in their own fields.
 Comparison between FFS and conventional Training &Visit

STEPS IN CONDUCTING FFS (CLASSICALL APPROACH)

There are 8 key classical steps in conducting FFS

1. Conduct Ground working activities:

• Identify focus enterprises

• Identify priority problems
• Identify solutions to identified problems
• Establish farmers’ practices
• Identify field school participants
• Identify field school sites

2. Training of Facilitators on:

• Crop/livestock production and protection technologies

• Field guides on how to effectively deliver crop/livestock production and protection
topics using non-formal education methods (NFE)
• Participatory technology development (PTD) with emphasis on the approaches and
developing guidelines on conducting PTD
• Non-formal education methods with emphasis on what, when and how to use NFE
in FFS
• Group dynamics
• Special topics to be addressed at every stage of training.

3. Establishment and Running FFS

With the guidance of facilitators, the group meets regularly throughout the season, and
• Carries out experiments and field trials related to the selected enterprise.
• Implement PTDs (Test and Validate)
• Conduct AESA and Morphology and collect data
• Process and present the data
• Group dynamics
• Special topics

4. Evaluating PTDs

• Analyse collected data

• Interpret
• Economic analysis
• Presentation

5. Field days

• During the period of running the FFS, field days are Organized where the rest of the
farming community is invited to share what the group has learned in the FFS.
• 1or 2 per season
• Farmers themselves facilitate during this day
6. Graduations

• This activity marks the end of the season long FFS. The farmers, facilitators and the
coordinating office usually organize it.
• Farmers are awarded certificates

7. Farmer run FFS

• FFS farmer graduates now have the knowledge and confidence to run their own
FFS.

8. Follow up by facilitators
• Occasionally the core facilitators will follow-up on schools that have graduated
preferably on monthly basis. The core facilitators also backstop on-going farmer run
FFS.