Sri Lanka’s first-ever Climate Smart Agriculture School opens at Thirappaney

The Climate Smart Irrigated Agriculture Project (CSIAP) has built a first-ever Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) School called Farm Field School (FFS) to promote CSA practices in Sri Lanka.  The FFS is used to train farmers and give hands-on experience on Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) practices to address the challenges of building strategies for climate change mitigation, adaptation, and food security (crop productivity),  which are closely related to agriculture and minimize their potential negative impacts and technologies to the beneficiary farmers of hot spot areas in 11 districts of six provinces such as North Western, North Central, Northern, Eastern, Uva and Southern Provinces where the CSIAP is being implemented. This fully pledged farm field school is located at Wagayakulama village of Thirappane, located approximately 30 km South of Anuradhapura town in the North Central Province.

The FFS was declared open by the Ministry of is declared open by Mr. Mahinda Amaraweera, Minister of Agriculture, Wildlife and Forest Resources Conservation on 04^th  at Thirappaney.  The main objective of FFS is to enhance the capacities of support organization officials and farmer leaders to promote CSA technologies and practices in their villages. Subsequently, the project aims to impart their knowledge and skills on CSA practices to village-level potential farmers to respond to the adverse climate impacts in their villages. In addition, the project mobilizes trained leader farmers to organize training activities and disseminate knowledge on CSA practices among peer groups.

Renowned Sri Lankan Film Director/Maker late Mr. Dharmasena Pathiraja’s son Dr. Milinda Pathiraja, Senior lecturer in Architecture, who took responsibility of the architectural design of the FFS has provided service with his team at Robust Architecture Workshop free of charge. Dr. Pathiraja was honoured with a Token of Appreciation for his contribution to the FFS at this ceremony. 

The FFS project costs around Rs 40Mn and the Ministry of Agriculture is the main agency responsible for executing the project.  The CSA is a new concept to the Sri Lankan farming society, even though the farmers apply some traditional CSA practices without a real scientific background. In this scenario, the project wishes to increase and build the capacities of farmers for the use of CSA technologies to combat the climate change impact. The project aims to build a village-level resource person pool with the competencies of CSA technologies & practices from support organization officials and selected leader farmers through the newly established FFS. 

All training programs are conducted with the collaboration of the Extension division of the Department of Agriculture (DOA), Peradeniya, including the allocation of potential resource persons for training sessions. The CSIAP is promoting various CSA practices via FFS  to increase crop productivity and ensure the food security of the project beneficiaries with a contribution to climate change adaptation and mitigation as follows.

1.     Climate-smart Home Garden Development
2.    Crops Diversification
3.    Implementation of Climate Smart Agronomic Interventions
4.    Promote Micro Irrigation
5.     Climate Smart Seeds Production
6.    Interseason Cultivation to increase cropping intensity

Each batch consists of 25 participants, including leader farmers and technical officials from a support organization. The participants are identified by the provincial Deputy Project Director (DPD) offices to represent all Agrarian Service center (ASCs) divisions and make necessary arrangements to transport them to FFS premises on time.

All sessions are to be organized as residential (03 days) intensive, multi-session and multi-activity group learning sessions that use lecturing, group discussions, demonstrations of practical activities, videos, and other audio-visual resources as well as entertainment activities (drams and role play), etc. 

The technology transfer plan for the FFS is developed by 07 modules. Each module consists of thematic areas to be covered and lessons/topics to be discussed and learning objectives to transfer the CSA technologies to the participants. These modules define how the knowledge acquired from training will be used for CSIAP interventions, how knowledge will be disseminated among fellow members, what roles to be played in Farmer Organizations (FOs), Producer Societies (PSs), and Cascade Management Committees (CMCs), and post-evaluation of the training.

The CSIAP is originally planning to carry out 74 training sessions for leader farmers and technical officers during the project period and build capacities of 1850 participants on CSA technologies and practices. Hence, the expected outcome is to establish a CSA knowledge hub within the village and disseminate CSA technologies among beneficiaries residing in the hotspot areas covering all 47 ASC divisions.  Subsequently, CSIAP is planning to disseminate the CSA technology and practices to the whole farming communities, those vulnerable to climate change impact in the country, with the intervention of the Department of Agriculture (DOA) officials.

The FFS is one of the most important assets for the farming community in Sri Lanka. Hence, ensuring its sustainability is important. As we mentioned earlier, all capacity-building programs will be conducted with the assistance of extension divisions of the Department of Agriculture (DOA) and it leads to creating a competent resource person pool in the Department of Agriculture (DOA) on Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) technologies and practices. Also, the training needs on CSA technologies will be increased due to the prevailing scenario. Therefore the project aims to enter into an agreement with the Department of Agriculture (DOA) and to hand over this program, including all assets, to ensure sustainable functions of the center for the betterment of the vulnerable farming communities to build their resilience against the climate change impacts.

Parliamentarian Mr. Duminda Dissanayake, Mr. Gunadasa Samarasinghe, Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture, Senior Officials of the Ministry of Agriculture, Provincial Department of Agriculture, Department of Agrarian Development, Field Crop Research & Development Institute, officials related to agriculture field, Eng. R.M.B. Rajakaruna, Project Director, Provincial Deputy Project Directors, Specialists and Officers of the CSIAP attended this event.