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Farms of the Future

Believable climate futures explored by Nepalese farmers

Submitted by Deepshikha on 11th December 2012
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CCAFS and Oxford University are conducting farmer trainings in Beora, Nepal. Photo: N.Palmer (CIAT)

by Chase Sova and Jessica Thorn

Researchers from the University of Oxford arrived in Beora, Nepal on a hot, humid day in May of this year. It was here, between the mid-hills region of Nepal and the border of India, that the team would spend the next four months working with farmers, collecting data on the tools, methods and frameworks to support climate change adaptation.

The main objective was the “Farms of the Future” (FOTF) project, an initiative designed to test how the climate analogues tool (PDF) could be used to inform decision making and improve the adaptive capacity of small-holder farmers. The Farms of the Future project is embedded in the Systemic Integrated Adaptation (SIA) research programme which conducted the research.

To give a background, the analogues tool uses downscaled temperature and precipitation predictions and current data sets to identify spatial analogues, i.e. sites with statistically similar temperature and precipitation trends, for the predicted 2030 climate of a given reference site as Beora. In the FOTF project, the analogue tool outputs were used to inform the selection of locations for farmer exchanges. Read more »

Finding the future for farmers in Beora Nepal

Submitted by Cecilia on 13th August 2012
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CCAFS is currently conducting a search for future farmland conditins, by compari

The Farms of the Future project helps farmers envision their future climate by taking them there… on a bus. Neil Palmer, from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) reports from Beora, Nepal, where the first farmer visits recently took place. This story was originally posted on the CIAT blog.

I knew not to expect “guide book” Nepal: majestic, snowy peaks; multicoloured prayer flags fluttering against clear blue skies. But nothing quite prepared me for the Terai. Around 120 km west of the capital Kathmandu, this is a hazy, sweltering, lowland plain, where daytime temperatures hover around 45 degrees Celsius, with little respite after dark.

With the sweat pouring off you day and night, it’s so hot it’s hard to concentrate. Every few minutes for the first few days, I’d close my eyes and catch fleeting, dream-like sequences of gulping down ice cold water; gushing Alpine waterfalls; news footage of buff-chested Russians swan-diving into semi-frozen lakes. You shake the images away, but the heat persists.

Despite the tough conditions, the Terai is Nepal’s breadbasket, producing around 50% of the country’s food. Rice, wheat, maize and a variety of vegetables are all grown here, in the northeastern reaches of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Read more »

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