

Agro-Insight
Ecuador Bolivia Peru
5/2020—5/2021
This project seeks to produce three, high-quality farmer learning videos, produced with selected McKnight Foundation grantees in Ecuador. Topics for AEI (agroecological intensification) may include, but not be limited to 1) alternative food systems, 2) managing seed potato degeneration, 3) managing pests of lupin, and 4) food assistance and farmers.
The videos will be made available to McKnight grantees in Ecuador in several formats: MP4 videos to show on laptops, as audio tracks for radio stations, as video format (3gp) to play on cell phones and as fact sheets (one-page PDF summaries of the video). The videos will also be published on a DVD in Spanish and Quechua for the grantees to use in communities. Agro-Insight will add three other appropriate videos made in other countries to the DVD. The videos will be translated into English and French (for audiences outside of Latin America) and all versions will be hosted on www.accessagriculture.org, where they will be available for free download by the global community. They may also later be translated to other languages, enhancing outreach, and all will be farmer-to-farmer and how-to. Each one will share information with a rural audience about how to use an technical or social (e.g. marketing) innovation chosen in coordination with the grantees and CCRP/Andes.
These videos will be short, about 15 minutes, that will start with a lively introduction of the problem at hand (e.g. problems with potato seed health) and then move rapidly into a set of farmer-approved solutions (e.g. how to store seed potatoes on farm). All of the McKnight grantees in Ecuador have several years’ experience working with Andean communities doing participatory, collaborative research on agroecological intensification. The goal is to capitalize on this researcher-farmer relationship. Agro-Insight will work with communities that have been able to improve their nutrition, livelihoods, productivity, and equity by using techniques developed with McKnight grantees. These videos produced with grantees will help other communities to achieve similar advances, and will document some of these scientific techniques, validated and improved by farmers. Each video will explain the scientific background behind the innovations (why they work) and a step-by-step demonstration of how they work.
Disseminate the results of research-and-development by McKnight Foundation grantees in Ecuador by producing and sharing three, high-quality farmer learning videos, in collaboration with selected McKnight Foundation grantees in Ecuador. Topics may include alternative food systems, managing seed potato degeneration, managing pests and disease of lupin, and food assistance and farmers.
Objectives: