With support from the Jastro-Shields Research Award and the Graduate Fellowship for Agricultural Development (GFAD) and in collaboration with the agricultural research organization CIMMYT, I spent 2 months in Nepal this summer conducting field research with smallholder farmers.

I first became interested in Nepali farming systems when I lived and worked alongside a rural community in the mid-hills region of Nepal as a Peace Corps Volunteer from 2017-2019, so this has been an amazing opportunity to explore some of my questions that were seeded at that time. The farmers in my Nepali host community taught me about local practices that integrate resources from across the agroecosystem including home, field crops, tree crops, livestock, and forest. Farmers there often blend traditional methods with introduced technologies like improved seed, inorganic fertilizers and walk-behind tractors, although expensive inputs remain inaccessible to many. In recent years, Nepal’s agricultural communities have been changing profoundly. The forces of globalization and out-migration have resulted in simultaneous labor scarcity and some new financial flexibility as family members send money home from the city or abroad, and climate change produces additional challenges.

My research project explores how farmers in these changing conditions are adapting their soil management strategies, and particularly their management of livestock manures for use in the cropping systems. Following up on a series of CIMMYT farmer surveys about manure management, I visited a number of villages in Gurbhakot Municipality, in Surkhet district of Western Nepal, to conduct in-depth interviews and focus groups with farmers. The stories they tell are complex, and each farm is a little different. 

In Nepal’s mid-hills region, livestock manures have traditionally been composted with other materials like household organic wastes and animal feed and bedding residues to produce a locally available soil amendment (locally called “gothe-mal” or “compost mal,” translated as Farmyard Manure - FYM) that provides nutrition to crops and a wealth of soil health and crop production benefits. The farmers I interviewed report that, as rural population declines and labor becomes scarce, it is becoming more challenging to keep livestock and do the work needed to get FYM to crop fields. Many describe a lack of FYM in recent years, which they associate with declining crop productivity. Farmers are responding to the challenge in different ways, many by substituting FYM with inorganic fertilizers, though it can be difficult for farmers to afford sufficient quantities of those inputs, and those purchased fertilizers do not provide all the benefits of FYM.

            Another facet of FYM management includes ways that farmers can adjust their techniques to increase nutrient conservation (reduce loss) in FYM throughout the process, which could be especially useful in a time of declining FYM availability. In recent years, farmers have been encouraged to adopt a package of “improved” manure management practices that includes storing manure in a pit (rather than a pile), covering the pile, turning the FYM, and incorporating FYM quickly after it is transported to the field. Some of those concepts are new to many of the farmers, some of them are not; on the whole, the improved management practices are adopted unevenly across the farms studied.

These changes to the rural landscape are not impacting all farmers equally, and there are intersectional factors – farmer gender and education level, family income, access to resources, and others – that play a role in shaping how farmers are adapting and innovating. As I dive deeper into the data, I plan to highlight strategic innovations that farmers have made (see photos of two farmers and their homemade FYM-management tools), as well as barriers that face farmers, especially in more marginalized communities. By identifying these barriers and opportunities, working with CIMMYT and local government, this research may shape local policy and agricultural extension to help farmers build more resilient farms and livelihoods in the midst of ongoing change.