097 – The Agroecology Hub

[00:00:00] Lucie: Hi and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name is Lucie Hazelgrove Planel, I’m a Social Impact Scientist and I’m here today with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS. Hi David.

[00:00:17] David: Hi Lucie. What are we discussing today?

[00:00:20] Lucie: Last week. We’re going to discuss last week if that’s okay.

[00:00:25] David: That’s a good idea. It might of course no longer be last week by the time the listener listens to it, but for us right now it’s last week. We were at the AE Hub Symposium in Kenya together, which was, for me, really enjoyable. I was going back into a community which I suppose I helped to found in a sense about five years ago. And so it was very, it was very meaningful for me.

[00:00:52] Lucie: First of all we should say what the AE Hub is.

[00:00:54] David: Yes. Do you want to try ?

[00:00:56] Lucie: I think you’re best placed.

[00:00:58] David: The AE Hub, it came about, of course this is, I don’t think I’ve yet done an episode with Beth. I must get her to do an episode. But it came about because Beth, was observing as part of the work we were doing working with communities and research projects in East Africa, where they were working on what was called farmer research networks. She really felt that there was an opportunity to take this approach and to work more closely with farmers, not directly, but through partner organisations. And that there was a real need to expand out this approach beyond just the research groups that were doing it and who were leading it at that point in time. And it wasn’t a criticism against the work that was happening. It was an observation that there was an opportunity that actually this approach was more widely useful than it was currently being shared.

We started with a scoping study where we, I suppose we, I did very little, she organised a set of students to go around and she went around with them across a lot of western Kenya, four or five counties, and actually scoped out all the organisations that were doing work which related to agroecology. And at that point, almost none of them were calling themselves agroecological in any shape or form. They were bio intensive agriculture, they were organic agriculture, they were, lots of different terms, but all related to the concepts of agroecology.

[00:02:46] Lucie: And working with smallholder farmers, yeah.

[00:02:48] David: And working with smallholder farmers. And many were doing some very interesting, very good work. And what she did is a scoping study to find out who was there, who was doing this work. And there was always this sense in Western Kenya that it was very crowded and people were stepping on each other’s toes, maybe even working with the same farmers.

So the scoping study sort of across these different counties tried to get her a lay of the land in terms of who was there, what was happening, what were they doing, what were the needs. And what she found was that the needs were huge, but there were lots of organisations doing things. There was very little coordination or collaboration between them, despite the fact that they were often all part of the same networks.

One of these big networks is this group called PELUM, who we’ve been working with quite closely since, and who were then brought in. And that’s really where the Agroecology Hub came to try and say actually, one of the reasons there wasn’t much collaboration was that everybody was doing something which was slightly differently and ideologically slightly different.

[00:03:51] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:03:51] David: Biointensive, to organic, to sustainable agriculture, the agroforestry group, and so on. Everybody had their own approach, and there was nothing bringing them together. That was not quite true because the PELUM network was trying to bring them together as a network, but it was bringing them together for advocacy, to try and promote these ideas as opposed to bringing them together to learn.

And that’s what she was wanting to do. She was wanting the farmers to learn, the researchers to learn, the NGOs to learn, the action partners to learn, for people to learn together. And so the Agroecology Hub started basically as this very small idea of trying to say, okay, what if we work together on these farm research network approaches, where we actually have the farmers learning, and we learn from what the farmers learn, and we actually check to see, with scientific evidence, what’s working, what’s not working, in which context, and so on.

And I was part of the initial inception meetings, which was so energising and really exciting. I still remember leaving one of those meetings in about 2019, I think. And in that meeting, every single group who came was energised and was ready and setting themselves up to go out and be part of something and do something together.

[00:05:14] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:05:15] David: Of course, come the end of 2019 into 2020 COVID hit and this disrupted everything. It was such a shame because there was such a sense of momentum and of course, when all your work is going out and interacting in person with farmers and you’re then told in lockdown you can’t go out and do anything and, everybody has it… it really was difficult. Everybody found it difficult in COVID for different ways, but for this particular project, of all the projects I was part of, this is the one where it really mattered. All momentum was lost, every organisation was then in crisis mode. Nobody was able to really think or collaborate because, everybody just needed to survive in some sense.

[00:06:04] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:06:05] David: That period was such a shame in that sense. But, during that period, there was work which still happened, and unfortunately, a lot of the organisations who weren’t as well known to the group at that point it was very difficult to bring them on board during those difficult times, but the organisations which were known, there were ways to support them and to enable them and to get work done, even in these difficult environments, using WhatsApp groups, using all sorts of innovations.

And good work was happening, but it wasn’t happening with all the partners in the way that one would have hoped if it hadn’t been.

[00:06:47] Lucie: Yeah, so COVID meant that it was less of a hub, it sort of reduced its size in order to actually make…

[00:06:53] David: It was still bringing together people who wouldn’t have been working together otherwise.

[00:06:58] Lucie: I meant less in terms of size, exactly, yeah.

[00:07:00] David: It was a smaller hub and it was more existing known entities rather than the expansive ideas at the beginning. And really they honed in and they did some really good work and they found out some amazing things. This all started, the big problem in Western Kenya at that point in time, and one of them still remains a big problem, was striga, which is this sort of really…

[00:07:24] Lucie: A weed.

[00:07:25] David: It’s a weed, which is very damaging…

[00:07:28] Lucie: Stops other crops growing.

[00:07:29] David: It’s one of those ones which is a nasty weed because it actually, if you’re healthy and everything’s going well, it doesn’t come. But if you’re down and out, it really hits you hard. It attacks unhealthy soils, when plants are struggling, that’s when it hits. And it’s been a big problem in a lot of Western Kenya, not all over, but a lot of places.

So the initial work was on striga and there were some real successes there. Not everywhere, but this was where it was so interesting to have it with these different groups. And that was sort of, work which was happening beyond, if you want, the AE Hub, but which the AE Hub was part of.

And then the AE Hub was bringing this approach to all sorts of other things, this Farmer Research Network approach. There was this group that were looking at botanicals and it then brought those botanicals to bear on chickens.

[00:08:15] Lucie: What do you mean by botanicals, sorry?

[00:08:17] David: Looking at botanical plants for controlling pests and diseases, for example.

[00:08:22] Lucie: Okay, yeah.

[00:08:23] David: So natural herbicides, pesticides.

[00:08:25] Lucie: Biopesticides.

[00:08:27] David: Biopesticides, exactly. So part of the work that was happening was that idea of, with the chicken, which is a sort of really important enterprise in many low resource environments, smallholder farmer context, there were lots and lots of issues just because it is expensive to give the birds all this medicine, and so people don’t. Therefore the chicks have a relatively low survival rate.

And with these, botanicals, they suddenly found, tephrosia in particular, really made a difference and everybody was able to do this and they were able to get some really interesting evidence, not as scientifically rigorous as we were hoping originally, for very interesting reasons, but really strong evidence. And it’s evidence which is… since been a little bit backed up by further studies, but not quite to the extent that we’d like.

Actually getting scientific rigour on this has been really hard. Now there is of course scientific evidence on this, and so this isn’t something which is coming out of nowhere, which is why it was tried in the first place. But the extent of the impact is just huge.

Our current hypothesis is that all the things that the farmer claims tephrosia is treating can’t be directly tephrosia treating them. It’s just that because the birds are healthier, their immune system is better. And because their immune system is better, they’re therefore able to throw off diseases that before would have affected them more seriously.

[00:10:04] Lucie: Yeah, that’s an interesting one.

[00:10:06] David: And so it’s something where clearly, what’s being reported by the farmers is just way beyond what is a scientifically logical direct consequence. But, what I think this is sort of an indicator of is the general health of those flocks. That those flocks, they’re shrugging off the other diseases which are knocking out their neighbour’s chickens. But their flock is healthy enough.

[00:10:38] Lucie: So the AE Hub it has a couple of roles of coordinating people, bringing groups together that work in similar topics, training…

[00:10:45] David: Farmer training in particular, one of the main things that happens as part of these Farmer Research Networks is that key members of the farmer groups come together, they discuss this, there’s a sort of whole adult education approach.

[00:10:57] Lucie: Yes, and using adult education approaches, which I don’t think any of the NGOs were discussing before.

[00:11:03] David: No.

[00:11:04] Lucie: I don’t think they were thinking about that.

[00:11:05] David: This is what’s so interesting. You know, a lot of credit to this has to go to Beth, because it’s been pretty systematic, how she thought this through, going from the actual looking at what the problems are, helping to identify the problems, to then actually helping the farmers solve their problems using scientific knowledge, rather than bringing scientific knowledge to solve the problems. It’s really been very powerful, that interplay.

And the whole aim of the AE Hub was to bring together the science, the movements, the practice, and actually to try and get the evidence. Now, if it has been failing somewhere, it is on documenting that evidence really strongly. Let me be clear here, good research is expensive and this has been done on a shoestring.

So it is not surprising that there isn’t the sort of deep body of scientific evidence that you would have hoped, but there hasn’t been the funding behind it to do that. If we had the right number of postdocs and researchers really working on this to support this, then that evidence could really be documented and built up.

But the truth is it’s been done on a shoestring, which has been extremely impactful and a very good way of doing it. I don’t say that’s how it should always be done, but it has been something where actually having run it on a shoestring, as it has run, it’s built up collaborations in a way which are really more authentic, which are really rather genuine because people are seeing the value for themselves.

And if the price we’ve paid is the rigour of the scientific evidence, but even that, I would argue that if we had the funding to make the scientific evidence more rigorous, I’m not sure the outcomes would have been better, which is a really interesting learning for me.

[00:12:57] Lucie: You mean the outcomes for the farmers?

[00:12:59] David: Exactly, the outcomes for the farmers and even the outcomes for our learning. Because the scientific rigour would have narrowed our thinking in a number of cases. For scientific rigour, there’s certain things that you do to be able to make sure you get the evidence. Whereas actually, because we haven’t focused on that, a lot of the hypotheses, and they’re not really solid evidence yet, but a lot of the hypotheses which are being generated are coming from left field. They’re coming from the fact that actually it wasn’t constrained, it wasn’t really focused on getting a single piece of evidence. And things that we didn’t expect to happen have happened and are now being observed and studied.

So there has been, I think, real value to not forcing, not letting the scientific approach lead as strongly as it would. Here am I, I’m a researcher, Beth’s a researcher, we are really leading the AE Hub. But we are not allowing the scientific approach to overrule the more organic approaches which are happening from the practice, if you want.

[00:14:01] Lucie: And that helps create the connections, perhaps, as a hub, that it isn’t just the leaders, the scientific leaders, and then all the hub members.

[00:14:08] David: Exactly. And this is where, we have, partly because there haven’t been the funds, we haven’t been able to put the time in, so our time on it has been limited. Beth’s time on it has been more substantial because she gave up her Cornell position to really focus on this. But even so, her role has been, you know, I don’t know if she’s published on it.

This is the thing, she’s got so much learning out of it, but her focus hasn’t been to get those rigorous publications. Oh, she keeps lamenting the fact that she’s not getting the quality of the data she’d like to be able to publish, but, the priority hasn’t been publication, and therefore she’s been focusing on the learning.

Now, we’ve discussed the fact that we need to help her to actually publish that learning and make it rigorous enough to publish. And that is something which we’ve discussed a role you could help play in terms of actually bringing in anthropological angle, actually studying the human impact of what’s happened.

But, it is something where actually letting go of some of that scientific rigour, I think has been healthy. And I think that a lot of the success of the AE Hub has come from that. And I think part of this also came from just the nature of COVID and what was possible in those times.

[00:15:26] Lucie: Absolutely.

[00:15:27] David: The most interesting one was the mole rat FRN. This was just astonishing to me that Beth took this on and was able to do this.

[00:15:36] Lucie: And how did it come about?

[00:15:37] David: It came about because this was the main problem some of the farmers were facing. There was a group of farmers, they would stop planting sweet potatoes and other crops because the mole rat problem was so severe in their area.

Beth said okay, if that’s your most serious problem, let’s figure it out, and let’s deal with it. And she brought together the farmers, and they had this sort of meeting where all the farmers who attended had this as a really severe problem. And what was so interesting is she did huge amounts of reading cos she wasn’t a mole rat expert beforehand, she’s a scientific expert but knew nothing about mole rats.

[00:16:11] David: But she got herself read up, got herself, with all the scientific knowledge, and then found she didn’t need to use almost any of it, because actually, compared to where the scientific literature on mole rats was, the farmer’s knowledge was almost better.

[00:16:24] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:16:24] David: Pretty much every important fact she had to share came from the farmers, and she didn’t need to share it. Because they were so severely affected by mole rats, they’d understood and they’d studied them essentially themselves. And so between them, the farmers had a lot of the knowledge and held a lot of the knowledge. Even the scientific knowledge, there was very little to add to what the farmers already knew.

And in the end, it was actually relatively traditional trapping methods, which were then used and adopted and had a huge impact in this and how they were built within the communities. And it’s been a really powerful, not just a lesson, but a sort of demonstration of how this approach done well does combine the scientific knowledge with the farmer’s practice and the farmer’s knowledge and work with communities in ways which are so powerful.

And again, the scientific literature hasn’t been expanded on this yet, as it should be, but it’s something where getting those learnings to go out, and it is expensive, it comes back to the fact that actually the AE Hub has run and it’s been built on really judicious use of a very small pot of money, which has built up a sense of momentum.

And this led to the symposium we were at last week.

[00:17:47] Lucie: I’m wondering whether, should it be a separate episode to actually talk about last week in the end?

[00:17:52] David: Let’s at least mention a few things from it. Now, I think you’re right that we should try and finish this soon, but I think this episode was supposed to be about the symposium and it was such an amazing event. And it was the first time the community, broader than those who had just been working together, got back together after COVID to discuss where they are.

And it wasn’t everybody from the original community, it was I think about half [of the] organisations in the end were there, that sort of order of magnitude. And there was just a lot of sharing and the first day started with the sharing where everybody shared with each other and that was very, I think, powerful.

[00:18:34] Lucie: Absolutely. They were also curious to find out what the different organisations were doing, how they were approaching it. People were asking each other really, really good questions.

[00:18:45] David: And they had so much in common, but they were also approaching things differently. And one of the things that I noticed, the dial had really moved in the five years since the 2019 meetings, 2020 meetings, in that everybody was now comfortable with the ideas around agroecology, whereas it was a new term there, and it was something which was alien to them then.

Now agroecology had sort of entered people’s consciousness as something which brought them together. It’s something they had in common.

[00:19:10] Lucie: That’s interesting.

[00:19:10] David: That even if one of them was biointensive and someone was something else, more environmental, they recognized that they had agroecology in common and this gave them a common sense of purposes and principles. And that was something which I thought was already very powerful. And that really, to me, came out the first day, that association with agroecology.

And then the second, third, and fourth days, actually, I pushed them pretty hard.

[00:19:38] Lucie: So the aim of the workshop was to identify projects to do together as a hub. And it was a four day workshop. So the aim was to get to that fourth day with some sense of a view towards the future.

[00:19:50] David: Exactly. And this idea that, right from the beginning, what was supposed to characterise the hub as being a hub and being different from the existing networks that existed and so on, which this isn’t about promoting what we’re doing. This is about doing things together so we can learn together. And actually identifying what are the things that we don’t know and we’re wanting to learn, what are the challenges that the farmers that we’re working with are facing, and how can we learn together.

And what was so interesting, was that this approach was still very alien to people. And there were some people who’d been involved in it now for a long time, but it was only really now that they clicked. One of the partners, I still remember who’s one of the more academic partners, had been involved in the hub since the beginning and was part of the original team and was always very influential.

But I somehow feel that it was last week that it finally clicked, oh, this is what the hub can do that is different from what I can do without the hub and is why I want to be part of the hub. There was a sense of I’m contributing to the hub before because of my expertise and so on, but the hub wasn’t bringing so much to him, the hub’s just another project. Whereas I felt there was really that sense where, no, actually what the hub is giving me is this ability to work on things that otherwise I couldn’t prioritise, because it needs a different type of approach. It needs a more collaborative approach, it needs more joint learning and joined up thinking.

[00:21:24] Lucie: That’s interesting, yeah.

[00:21:25] David: And not everybody, I think, had that sort of aha moment, that I think a couple of people had. And this is something where, for Beth and myself, it was the original inception meetings where we understood that role of the hub.

And I think that some of the partners had contributed to us understanding, because we were very conscious the hub shouldn’t replicate things that already existed, it needed to fill a gap that didn’t exist in that context. And that’s where this idea of doing things together so that we can get this joint learning on questions that we couldn’t answer as individual organisations, or where there was benefit to doing this as a hub.

This really, I think, clicked with a number of members who had never quite understood it and the role that the hub could play before. And so for me, the symposium, what was so interesting about it is that this was the end, not the beginning. The beginning is early next year.

[00:22:22] Lucie: Yes.

[00:22:24] David: It’s the inception meeting for the new phase. This was the end, this was trying to get the learnings from the previous phase, which is the last one where we’re directly leading it. What’s fantastic is, we as IDEMS have handed over. It’s the partners in Kenya, who are now leading it. They’re leading the new phase and our role has diminished. We’re still a partner, but we don’t control the finances, we don’t have, direct commitments in the same way, and direct responsibility, I should say.

[00:22:57] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:22:59] David: And so we’re now a partner like many others. And to me, this is, this feels like a real achievement, because there’s no way five years ago that Manor House could have taken responsibility as it is now. And now I’m absolutely confident in handing over the responsibility for the hub to Manor House. Five years ago, they wouldn’t have collaborated, they wouldn’t have shared with others. They’d have just said, we need all the resource for ourselves.

I don’t mean this in a bad way about them, but that’s just where they were, because that’s all they could worry about. But they’ve matured in terms of understanding how actually their success is not simply because they take what they can for themselves. No, their real success has come because of the way they’ve been collaborating with others through the hub.

And that the hub funding, although it is central to their continued existence and so on, maximising on that hub funding is not the way for them to maximise, because it’s the collaboration and bringing everyone along with them which enables them to grow. I am confident in a way that I wasn’t five years ago, that they will be able to manage those funds well, and really, not, build, yes this is the thing, it’s building the community.

This is it. The hub is essentially a community. And Manor House is now ready to lead and build that community in the driving seat. And it has the respect of its peers in a way that five years ago it didn’t.

[00:24:40] Lucie: Exactly, it’s been able to demonstrate that it can do it and that it’s done it with success.

[00:24:44] David: Yes, and that others can benefit from being part of the hub and there’s this mutual benefit which is happening with Manor House leading this. Oh, it was a wonderful week last week. It was also for me personally, it was the first time in a long time when I’ve got my hands dirty with this again, if that makes sense. Actually being part of it, I felt part of the community, I was contributing. I’ve been very standoff because I’ve been trying to hand over. But now my role had changed and I was able to be really hands on but in a position of non responsibility.

[00:25:21] Lucie: Yeah.

[00:25:21] David: And so in that changed position, which I hope was appreciated. It was a really nice moment for me.

[00:25:28] Lucie: And it was nice for the transition for Manor House to be taking on new responsibilities, that it was somebody who was slightly more independent, who was facilitating the workshop just last week, yeah.

[00:25:38] David: It was a good week.

[00:25:41] Lucie: We’ll be no doubt having other episodes about what the AE Hub gets up to and what the outcomes of the week are and how the different organisations take it on.

[00:25:50] David: Yes. I look forward to seeing what happens and there’s the inception meeting early next year.

[00:25:58] Lucie: Exactly. So it wasn’t even an inception meeting. It was very much a sort of thinking through what sort of ideas could be possible.

[00:26:04] David: Yeah.

[00:26:05] Lucie: Which would then be planned afterwards.

[00:26:07] David: Exactly. And that’s where things get concrete and so on. Anyway, it was a fun week. We’ve gone a bit over what we should have in this session, so it’s been a bit longer than it should have. But anyway, it’s been nice. It’s been fun to discuss. And yeah let’s have a follow up at some point where we actually discuss some of the ideas that came out of last week, and even the facilitation approach.

[00:26:28] Lucie: Yeah. Great. Thanks, David then.

[00:26:33] David: Thank you.