Farmers for Forests - Updates Thread

[Krutika]

1) Overall updates (since the last update)

Hello everyone! This is the first update from Farmers for Forests (F4F). We’re a not-for-profit working on increasing and protecting India’s biodiverse forest cover in close collaboration with rural communities like farmers and indigenous tribes.

We’ve been in existence for little over a year now and work in 3 districts of Maharashtra. Our main programs are:

• Gadchiroli - Forest protection and reforestation in 10,000 hectares of community owned land in collaboration with 71 gram sabhas
• Raigad - Forest protection and reforestation pilot study over ~125 acres of land and 25 villages. This work is being carried out in collaboration with J-PAL South Asia and UC Berkeley who will be evaluating our work
• Ahmednagar - Afforestation in degraded farmer lands that are no longer being used for cultivation. We’ve completed afforestation in 10 acres and are in the process of doing another 10 this year

2) Progress on the goals listed while on-boarding

• GIS mapping of forests in Raigad completed; in the process of beginning baseline drone orthomosaic capture and baseline surveys
• Afforestation on 4 acres of land in Ahmednagar begun
• Survey with 71 gram sabhas begun to collect information to create a project design document for Verra / Plan Vivo

3) Any challenges

• Funding as always is a challenge Because we don’t yet have our 80G, FCRA, CSR registrations it’s been trickier still
• Physical exhaustion. Because our work is so physically intensive, everyone working on the field has been getting burnt out pretty quickly.

4) Any new avenues of collaboration (with other Grantees of RCF or other NPO/NGO)

We’re already collaborating with 3 Gadchiroli based not-for-profits. SEARCH which is run by Dr. Abhay and Rani Bang. Aamhi Amchya Arogyasathi which is run by Dr. Satish Gogulwar and Vrikshamitra which is run by Mr. Mohan Hirabhai Hiralal.

In addition to this, we’re exploring two additional collaborations:

• With Waatavaran for securing Community and Individual Forest Rights (under the FRA, 2006) in Gadchiroli
• With the Mitti Collective for a survey on Regenerative Agriculture in India

5) Highlights from the initiatives being undertaken as part of your organization

We’re beginning work this month on developing a tree counting algorithm using drone imagery to measure change over short periods of time (quarterly) in tree cover in Raigad & Gadchiroli. We’re super excited about that!

We’re also beginning a small mangrove reforestation pilot in the next 2-3 months! Very excited about that too

We also recently added two reforestation arms to the Raigad study with the aim of figuring out ways of encouraging scalable and sustainable reforestation in forest-dependent communities.

6) Outcomes you are chasing for the next 6 months (these can remain the same if unchanged since the last update)

These remain unchanged from our first submission. Here there are, anyway!

For the 6 months until (Sept 2021) we aim to:

1. Intervention and control areas identified in Gachiroli & Raigad Gadchiroli; field team set up and functioning
2. First draft of project design document ready; process to get No Objection Certificate from Forest Department completed
3. GIS mapping of all project area completed
4. Biodiversity registers for all Gram Sabhas in the project completed
5. Forest Department given orders for 4,00,000 saplings that Gram Sabhas can use for plantation in the next years pre-monsoon seaso
6. First round of survey completed in Raigad
7. Plantation for 30,000 trees (15 acres) done in Ahmednagar

7) KPIs (please use this section to let us know of the impact and reach of your work since the last update)

This is our first update!

8) Can Rainmatter be of help with anything at all

We’re still trying to figure out a cheap, scalable way of tracking impact of reforestation / afforestation on groundwater. Would be great to get some support on this.

While we’ve been getting support from Botanical Survey of India and our nursery partners, like Mr. Raghunath Dhole on species selection, we’ve been wanting to get on board someone with significant ecology / forestry experience as an advisor. Most of our advisors are from a finance and not-for-profit background. We would be grateful if Rainmatter can introduce us to people from their network who we might get on board as advisors.

9) Any additional details you would like to provide

We’ve recently completed developing a comprehensive donor dashboard to provide detailed information to donors (see a partial screenshot below). We’d be grateful to get feedback / thoughts / insights on how we can improve this.

10) Please also share any images or videos that you have documented as part of your work

Our COO, Dr. Vaibhav Mahatme in discussion with Raigad community members on reforestation:

Meetings & coffee under a tree in Gadchiroli - seen in the picture members from SEARCH, Foundation for Ecological Security, Aamhi Amchya Arogyasathi, Vrikshamitra, Farmers for Forests and Shri Dehvaji Tohfa (leader of the village Menda Lekha):

[Krutika]

It’s been 1.5 years since our last update!

Here’s what’s happened, in a nutshell:

• We’re working in 7 districts of Maharashtra now: Pune, Ahmednagar, Solapur, Beed, Gadchiroli, Gondia and Raigad
• Our numbers so far are ~650 acres of afforestation and reforestation; ~3000 acres of vulnerable forests under protection; over 17,000 days of rural employment generated
• We have a team of nearly 50 F4Fers now!

In addition to our forest protection and restoration work, we have 4 other areas where we’ve been focusing:

(1) Remote monitoring of new and existing forests through satellite and drone data. This has been fun. We’ve had a good amount of success in modifying the open source DeepForest algorithm to count trees and measure their height and girth. The tech part is essential to the payments for ecosystem services model, since we can use this to make results-based payments. Here’s a picture:

(2) We’ve established two sapling nurseries and are in the process of establishing one biodiversity park. The park, with over 350 varieties of trees, shrubs, flowering plants, creepers, veils and grasses showcases the rich botanical heritage of Maharashtra and helps serve a seed bank for us and the communities.

(3) We’re collaborated with the Integrated Tribal Development Project Offices to launch a mobile science laboratory in the forests of Gadchiroli. Along with the prescribed science curriculum, the children are also taught about the importance and the economic and ecological value of the forests, climate-change and its devastating impact and astronomy. Here’s a video on the MSL work.

(4) And finally, this is the closest thing to our hearts! We’re supporting the forest department in Gadchiroli on their elephant response. The elephants have been somewhat dangerous and rather destructive and we are now putting together a comprehensive plan to prevent some of this in the coming months. Here’s some beautiful pictures of them hanging out in the forest:

We’re partnering with several non-profits and other organizations on our projects. Our two most recent partnerships are:

• With the amazing team at AgroRangers to implement a 150 acre Agroforestry model in Pune district in FY 23-24
• With the incredibly knowledgeable teams at SAGE foundation and The Grasslands Trust on our elephant projects work

The biggest challenges we’ve faced in the last year are:

• Setting in place systems to manage a larger operations team
• Convincing our communities to plant more “biodiversely” on their agricultural lands
• Convincing our communities to prevent anthropogenic forest fires
• Figuring out ways of reducing our own negative environmental impacts - like finding alternatives to black plastic sapling bags or reducing our own fossil fuel usage as we travel to meet different communities

However, in spite of the challenges and the long, long way we still have to go, we’re tremendously grateful to be able to get to do the work we love to do everyday

[Sharda]

Hi @Krutika ,
Love what you are doing at F4F

Read about the Gadchiroli farmers project in The Print , I also come from Chandrapur district and understand the issues in Vidarbha.

Curious to know under which standard the project is registered ?

Thanks,
Sharda

[Krutika]

Hi Sharda! Thank you so much for the kind words

Our project is currently being registered and validated on the Verra CCB standard. Do come visit our field locations in Gadchiroli and Gondia sometime!

[Sharda]

Thanks !! and yes definitely during my next visit to home.

[Krutika]

Overall Updates

• It’s been a tough monsoon season for us, with rainfall being far lower than expected , specifically in the Marathwada region of Maharashtra. There is a revival in monsoon expected in September and we are hopeful

• We and our field teams were super happy at the number of visitors we’ve had come to our Gadchiroli, most of our visitors usually come to the Marathwada region (closer to Pune), but this year Gadchiroli has bucked the trend with 90% of our visitor inflow here. While visits do take away from our team’s day to day work, we’ve found an unexpected benefit of this is a huge uptick in team motivation levels. Our field teams are super excited and super proud to show their work and also speak about all of the stories and interesting things that have been happening the field. So anyone reading this - do plan a visit! We’re looking forward to hosting more people

• This year we are really focusing on farmer outreach through different channels (other than only field visits), which has given us some pretty cool results - (1) WhatsApp has been a great way to reach out to farmers in Marathwada and (2) Farmers in the Vidarbha region (Gadchiroli, Gondia) where network connectivity is low have loved our training programs on forest fires, elephants, carbon credits and cookstoves once we introduced a skit and some food and hot beverages. Our training programs earlier used to be okay-okay, but community members were getting bored hearing about climate change and forest fires, some of them would fall asleep in the training. Introducing the skit and food element had such an immediate and dramatic effect in terms of engagement, community members finding us more approachable, reaching out to us and really just engaging on a much deeper level. We’re so proud of our field teams for coming up with the entire dialogue, tailoring it to include local references and really just improvising and iterating on the spot with each performance - when the only suggestion they had gotten was - “Can we do this in a skit format?”. We are now thinking of doing the entire training program as a skit and also including props (like elephant costumes, etc) and are looking for support and connections to groups who do this (street plays) and can help us perform better. Sharing some photographs from the trainings below.

• Schools have opened up, after the summer and our Mobile Science Lab is operating in full-swing.

• And finally some bad news. Two of our earliest program participants in Ahmednagar got rid of the trees we’d planted on their land. This was one of our earlier plantations and was quite dense (2000 trees / acre) and full of biodiversity trees (50+) species. The specific feedback from them was: (1) the trees are too dense and the forest looks “ugly” and “wild”. The neighbours are complaining that these forest areas within the village are prime target for leopards and robbers to hide (2) the plantation is too dense to harvest anything and (3) we would prefer one or two type of primarily fruit trees planted on the land and fewer wild trees (what our new plantation models developed in collaboration with farmers are now doing) (4) Can the cash transfer amounts be higher?

Photographs from the field

Forest foraged mushrooms

Stills from the training program

Chai-biscuit makes training programs fun

Childen at the Sode Ashram school wait their turn for a demo in the Science Lab

KPIs

• 400 acres of additional agroforestry since April 2023
• Tree counting algorithm now being trained to identify species - some initial progress made, but species identification rate is still lower than 60%
• A series of 3 articles on Farmers and Carbon Markets published in The Print

New avenues of collaboration

• CWS on the Wild Incubator program. CWS is going to be funding and supporting our work with elephants. We’re very excited about this!
• Mulago Henry Arnhold Fellowship for Conservation - we are thrilled to be working with and learning about global models of conservation that have worked across a wide variety of regions through the other fellows and figuring out commonalities and designing for scale
• WRI’s Land Accelerator Cohort for 2023

Can Rainmatter be of help

• We’re super grateful for the connections made to elephant experts - now looking for help connecting with street play performers. Especially anybody doing this in the climate space / and / or in Marathi

[Mari]

Krutika, will ask around for the street play collab and get back.
How about the folks who did Prithviche Shetkari millets.artistichumans.com via @abhishektiwari

[abhishektiwari]

@Mari thanks for remembering them. They’d be a great partner as their millet awareness theater and street play work is primarily in Marathi. They have done dozens of performances across villages and the Maharashtra govt recently gave them a letter of appreciation.

Will connect @Krutika and team.

[Darshan]

Thank you @abhishektiwari for being there and sharing about our work. Means a lot.

Happy to assist @Krutika .

Our new play Pruthvi Che Shetkari talks about how every citizen on this planet is a farmer of the earth, our motherland.

-it covers multiple points such as climate change, environment conversation, importance of millets.

-it highlights the importance of traditional crops verses cash crops and how we need to maintain a balance.

• The play is made in a proscenium format with a duration of 65 mins. It includes 6 traditional dances too.

-If you need a street play, the story and the format would be different. If you could brief me more on your requirements, we can workout accordingly.

To read more about the play, you can check the review by renowned theatre critic Sanjay Dahale here. The drive includes more details about the play: Prithvi Che shetkari project (millet play) – Google Drive

United Nations official website has also featured our play:

पृथ्वी चे शेतकरी | Pruthvi Che Shetkari

[Darshan]

Hi Mari, thank you remembering us. Means a lot.

We had a successful opening of our play in Marathi (Pruthvi Che Shetkari) and opened in Hindi on 15th August as ‘Dharti Ke Kisaan’.

We have got inquires and request to produce in it other languages too. We are working on creating initial traction to take it forward.

[Krutika]

@Mari & @abhishektiwari - thank you so much for the connect!

@Darshan - Pruthviche Shetkari sounds fantastic! Is there a Youtube link where we could watch it? Also if you would you kindly DM me your contact details, we will get in touch with you to set-up a call or a meeting!

[Darshan]

Yes, we can share the video link for your persual.

We can connect at 9930732829. I haven’t been active here. Sorry for the delay in response.

@Krutika

[nileshhiremath]

Atul Pethe & team from ANIS Andha Shraddha Nirmulan Samiti have been activeky doing street plays. They are from puNe & reachable.

I have connect with them & would be happy to facilitate your meeting.

Regards
Nilesh Hiremath

[Krutika]

Thank you @Darshan and @nileshhiremath ji. I will be in touch offline!