Three members of myAgro’s Team Tamba in the field of an early adopter farmer.
After having spent well over a year working in myAgro’s headquarters in Mali I moved to Senegal to assist with our team’s efforts in the Tambacounda. While the general structure of the myAgro model implemented in Senegal is the same as in Mali, there are several differences in Tamba which provide both challenges and opportunity:
- In some villages, there are up to 4 cultural groups living side by side. Our agents speak on average, 3 languages fluently and are able to cross the cultural divide just as easily.
- Villages are so small, that most do not have vendors. Farmers are used to going to a nearby market to buy their local goods.
- Men and women plant separately, like in Mali, but there are more options for Senegalese women to plant different crops. In Mali women in our zone plant peanuts only during the rainy season whereas in Senegal women can plant peanuts, maize and sorghum.
- Farmers in Tamba have access to over 20 hectares (48 acres) on average and are used to planting with basic animal-drawn tools for land prep, planting and harvesting.
This recent season we planted with over 80 farmer leaders who are now counting down the days until harvest. They’re sharing their experiences of working with myAgro with their neighbors and showing them their myAgro field, which is usually planted directly next to their traditional field for comparison.
As we work to adapt our Mali-based program to the Tamba environment and culture, we’re learning more about what’s critical to the myAgro model and what’s more flexible. Farmer-to-farmer marketing and incorporating team and farmer feedback is, we found, the key to success in both programs.
To ensure we’re always incorporating feedback, new trainings are “test-driven” at our Monday staff meetings before being finalized and delivered to farmers. Agents last Monday gave us feedback on how to improve the harvest process – while in Mali most harvesting is done by hand, farmers in Senegal use attachments on their animal-drawn plows to harvest more quickly. We quickly scrapped the manual harvest training and worked together with our agents to outline a more detailed harvest storage training instead.
