About the Exhibit: Farming for Change

This exhibit chronicles some of the struggles and achievements of smallholder farming families in Malawi and Tanzania, in their efforts to improve food security, nutrition, social equity, and sustainable land management in the face of climate change. Climate change is one of many challenges that farmers need to take into consideration, alongside deep gender and other social inequalities, poverty, degraded soils, and limited state support.

The photos and videos are drawn from over 15 years of participatory research carried out by Dr. Rachel Bezner Kerr (Development Sociology) and other researchers in collaboration with smallholder farmers. The methods depicted in this exhibit are based on ecological principles to design resilient, sustainable, low-input farming systems that draw on smallholders’ agricultural knowledge and complex understanding of local environmental conditions. The farmers select their own experiments based on a range of agroecological options.

Local farmer research teams teach other farmers organic methods of improving food security, provide nutritional ideas, and raise issues of social equity through exchanges, field trips, training, and community events. Farmers have used community­led educational strategies such as recipe days, discussion groups, and participatory theatre to promote local knowledge of different recipes, food processing techniques, healthy child care practices, and address gender and other social inequalities, which are barriers to improved food security and nutrition. This approach has led to improved land management, food security and nutrition, and speaks to the resilience, strength and innovation of smallholder African farming families.

Rachel Bezner Kerr is an Associate Professor in the Department of Development Sociology, a Faculty Fellow of the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, and Project Director of the Malawi Farmer-to-Farmer Agroecology Project.

Email: rbeznerkerr@cornell.edu

Twitter: @rbeznerkerr