FFB – Agri-Logic

Farmer Field Book on smallholder cocoa farming Côte d’Ivoire for three large cocoa traders

Three Farmer Field Book projects on cocoa farming are ongoing in Côte d’Ivoire in collaboration with three large trade houses. A total of 1,075 cocoa farmers participate in these programs. They record data on their daily farming activities. The gathered data provide insight in the farmers’ farming practices, their cocoa production and productivity as well as their costs and income. Based on these data, recommendations can be made to improve farming practices. An important point of improvement, for example, is the use of fertiliser. Very few cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire use fertiliser, and even fewer farmers use fertiliser with sufficient nitrogen content. As a result, soil nutrients are being depleted and cocoa productivity is low. This may push farmers to cut down forest to use its nutrient-rich soil for cocoa farming. Improved fertiliser use may help to avoid this by preventing soil nutrient depletion.

Agri-Logic provides the project partners with detailed analyses on the drivers of cocoa productivity and farmer income, in which activities as well as other characteristics are considered. Groups of farmers are compared to evaluate the impact of various project interventions aimed to benefit farmers. The analyses also shed light on social topics such as the gap to a living income, gender pay gap and the occurrence of child work and the risk of the occurrence of child work.

New Insights on Reaching Living Income (IDH & partners)

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Farmer Field Book on coffee farming in Honduras for Olam Honduras

In collaboration with Olam Honduras 2019 has seen the start of a new Farmer Field Book project in Latin America. In Honduras, Arabica coffee is grown. However, productivity of coffee farmers in the department of Santa Bárbara is among the lowest in the country. To gain more insight in how farmer productivity can be improved, two-hundred coffee farmers in Santa Bárbara participate in the Farmer Field Book, or ‘el libro de campo’ in Spanish. For this program, the farmers record data on their daily farming activities. This data is collected frequently and digitized. Agri-Logic and Olam Honduras provide the farmers with individual profit-and-loss reports as well as group reports. This allows the farmers to compare their investments and results with each other and share knowledge on best farming practices. Group discussions among farmers are facilitated to stimulate them to further improve their coffee farming practices. For farmers with low coffee productivity it is difficult to compete with large-scale coffee producers such as exist in Brazil. Improving farmer productivity is a way to improve farmer income from coffee.

Farmer Field Book for ISLA Vietnam

IDH’s landscapes programme, ISLA, works together with government, business and civil society to improve livelihoods and contribute to economic development while minimizing environmental harm. One of the focus regions is the Central Highlands region in Vietnam. To gain a better understanding of the effects of its interventions on farmers, industry and landscapes, rigorously collected data at farm level is required.

IDH and the implementing partners in Vietnam use the Farmer Field Book (FFB) methodology to allow rigorous monitoring & evaluation for the ISLA programme. Agri-Logic has developed special software functionalities for this programme and supported the training of field staff. We also perform a large part of the data analysis and reporting of results.

The FFB approach for ISLA includes reports at four levels: the individual farmer level, the farmer group level, the company level and the ISLA programme level. The first set of reports was delivered in July 2017, covering the crop year 2016-2017. The programme level reports can be downloaded below. The reports cover topics such as farm economics of different production systems, toxic loading, carbon footprint, farm economic and agronomic performance and assessment of production practices’ influence on productivity and profitability.

ISLA Vietnam Farmer Field Book analysis 2016-17 (IDH & partners)

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ISLA Vietnam Farmer Field Book analysis 2016-19 (IDH & partners)

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Farmer segmentation for optimised service delivery

By assignment of IDH Sustainable Trade Initiative, Agri-Logic conducts 4 farmer segmentation studies to optimise service delivery by Supply Chain Management companies to farmers, in order to increase the impact at farmer level.

Many supply chain companies offer services to smallholder farmers to improve productivity, quality and profitability at farm level, and to secure their supply. The effect of these services at farm level is mixed and there is a strong desire to improve their performance. One way to do this is to group farmers in segments based on household and farmers characteristics. These segments are likely to have differing needs, development potential, ambition levels and investment rationales. When these segments are defined, services could possibly be better targeted and return on investment of service delivery could be improved.

The objective of this project is to gain experience with farmer segmentation exercises and to share the learnings of these experiences to support supply chain partners and IDH to segment farmers. Additionally, we aim to develop tailor-made services and products in order to increase the return on investment for supply chain partners, farmers and organizations that are co-investing in service delivery models. Four segmentation case studies are performed with coffee and cocoa supply chain partners in West- and East-Africa.

The envisioned results are:

For each segmentation case study: identification of farmer segments, their defining characteristics and recommended tailor-made service packages
A set of guidelines on how to monitor effects of service packages on different farmer segments and knowing when to change a strategy
A framework for organisations on how to realize effective farmer segmentation to optimise service delivery

Farmer Field Book implementation Ghana

Sustainable Management Services Ghana (part of Ecom group), a number of its chocolate manufacturing clients and IDH, The Sustainable Trade Initiative run a large scale sustainability programme in Ghana targeting tens of thousands of cocoa farmers. The programme aims to improve their productivity, profitability and in turn enhance farmer loyalty. All parties expressed a need to gain better insight into farm and farmer performance and an enhanced understanding of the programme’s effects.

To meet the requirements, Agri-Logic is assisting Ecom and its partners to implement the Farmer Field Book. Close to 1,075 farmers across 43 districts keep daily records of all their activities, investments and outputs on their cocoa farms. This information is collected every 2 weeks and digitised in the FFB software. Every year each farmer receives a detailed agronomic and economic profit & loss statement as well as a group report that details the performance of each farmer versus that of his/her peers. Agri-Logic trains Ecom staff on implementation of the FFB and supports the implementation by analysing the collected data at different levels. At company level a sophisticated report is made each year that details the effects of Ecom-provided training and inputs to farmers on e.g. productivity, profitability and loyalty. Data from Ghana is then merged with FFB data from other cocoa-producing countries for meta analysis of the IDH cocoa programme.

Results so far:

64 Ecom management and staff trained in FFB implementation
Same staff trained on farm level data analysis
1075 farmers keep records on a daily basis
Collection of the third year’s data currently on-going