School of Sustainability

Fifty-three farmers score their own land before the agave goes in

At the end of July, fifty-three smallholders travelled to Vía Orgánica, Regeneration International's sister organisation in Mexico, for two days answering questions about their own plots. They had come from sixteen municipalities across the state of Guanajuato. The questions were not a formality: plot size, crops, animals, household decisions, farm income, pesticide exposure. Each answer fed into a single score.

The instrument is TAPE, the FAO's Tool for Agroecological Performance Evaluation, which rates ten elements of a farming system from zero to a hundred. It was built to be used by farmers rather than on them - it works at the scale of a single plot, and the results can later be pooled to read a whole region. The point of the sessions was to fix a baseline: a written record of where each farm starts, so there is something honest to measure change against eighteen months from now.

The sessions open a collaboration between Regeneration International and Renature that aims to train two hundred smallholders, half men and half women, in agroforestry using agave with companion trees, under the Billion Agave Project. Soil samples from participants' fields are being read for their physical, chemical and biological condition, and further field interviews follow over the coming months. Two days of questions first, then the planting; whether the baseline survives contact with the growing season is the part worth watching.

Regeneration International · Read the source