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Food For Yields Agri-Livestock Network

The concept for the Food-for-Yields Agri-Livestock Network was generated from a preliminary needs assessment by Tropical Focus for Rural Development in 2006 for the widow-headed households in the communities it serves. This two-part intervention offers immediate relief food and supplies to widows and their children, and ultimately establishes food security and economic and social income in the area through an ongoing agri-livestock network.

• The first component - the outreach feeding program - is slated to run for two years and will initially utilize Children Rescue Mission, Kenya as a feeding and supply distribution center for six widows and thirty orphans in the first six months. Subsequently, fourteen additional widows and seventy orphans will be included in the program, once a vehicle is procured to deliver food to households of greater distance from the feeding and distribution center, or to households of infirmed widows.
• The second component - the agri-livestock network - is planned to begin in conjunction with the feeding program, but will operate indefinitely. While widows do not possess sufficient land for subsistence cultivation to support their families, they do have enough land for very small-scale agricultural activities. The widows will be trained in sustainable and efficient agricultural practices to maximize the sustainable cultivation capacities of their land. The primary function of the intervention is to leverage the little land widows control, traditionally used for underproductive subsistence agriculture, and convert it into income-generating, super-productive land.

This objective will be achieved using two complementary strategies – 1. The implementation of the principles of permaculture (food production in distressed agricultural contexts using minimal resources) and 2. The introduction of livestock, the single most important factor in lifting people out of or plunging people into poverty, into the agricultural profile. Permaculture is an agricultural practice that enhances the native agricultural practices by ensuring agricultural resources are efficiently allocated, that waste and reusable resources are always utilized and that environmentally destructive behaviors are corrected. The teachings of permaculture consider livestock to be extremely beneficial to agricultural production. Livestock has never been available to the widows; poultry and goats, along with animal husbandry training, will be provided as a part of the intervention. Proper training in livestock care ensures healthy and productive animals that will provide milk and eggs to eat and sell, free natural fertilizer and offspring to sustain the program for generations. The agri-livestock network will model the phasing of the feeding program - six households will be included in the first six months, then the intervention will expanded to all twenty households.

Though participants will specialize in growing a variety of vegetables and raising different livestock according to their household’s agricultural conditions, as part of the agri-livestock network, they will share yields with each other for personal consumption and public sale. A community store will be established for the sale of vegetables, milk and eggs. The store will be developed and managed by the widows to add another layer of value to participants who will hone critical business management skills. One of the most beneficial pieces of the intervention is to educate widows and their children about initiating and maintaining a business.