Farmer Field School

The Farmer Field School (FFS) is a group-based learning process that has been used by a number of governments, NGOs and international agencies to promote Integrated Pest Management (IPM). The first FFS were designed and managed by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Indonesia in 1989 since then more than two million farmers across Asia have participated in this type of learning.

The Farmer Field School brings together concepts and methods from agroecology, experiential education and community development. As a result, hundreds of thousands of rice farmers in countries such as China, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam have been able to reduce the use of pesticides and improve the sustainability of crop yields. The FFS has produced other developmental benefits that are broadly described as ‘empowerment’: FFS alumni in a number of countries are involved in a wide-range of self-directed activities including research, training, marketing and advocacy.

The basic features of a typical rice IPM Farmer Field School are as follows:

The IPM Field School is field based and lasts for a full cropping season.
A rice FFS meets once a week with a total number of meetings that might range from at least 10 up to 16 meetings.
The primary learning material at a Farmers Field School is the rice field.
The Field School meeting place is close to the learning plots often in a farmer’s home and sometimes beneath a convenient tree.
FFS educational methods are experiential, participatory, and learner centred. Each FFS meeting includes at least three activities: the agro-ecosystem analysis, a “special topic”, and a group dynamics activity.
In every FFS, participants conduct a study comparing IPM with non-IPM treated plots.
An FFS often includes several additional field studies depending on local field problems.
Between 25 and 30 farmers participate in a FFS. Participants learn together in small groups of five to maximise participation.
All FFSs include a Field Day in which farmers make presentations about IPM and the results of their studies.
A pre- and post-test is conducted as part of every Field School for diagnostic purposes and for determining follow-up activities.
The facilitators of FFS’s undergo intensive season-long residential training to prepare them for organising and conducting Field Schools.
Preparation meetings precede an FFS to determine needs, recruit participants, and develop a learning contract.
Final meetings of the FFS often include planning for follow-up activities.
Although Farmer Field Schools were designed to promote IPM, empowerment has an essential feature from the beginning. The curriculum of the FFS was built on the assumption that farmers could only implement IPM once they had acquired the ability to carry out their own analysis, make their own decisions and organise their own activities. The empowerment process, rather than the adoption of specific IPM techniques, is what produces many of the developmental benefits of the FFS