Stories of Most Significant Change
Farmers tell us the most important changes they experienced after using CASI technologies
“This project makes women more happy, this technology saves on irrigation and labour so this is why they’re happy”
The Sustainable and Resilient Farming Systems Intensification
(SRFSI) project has been working across the Eastern Gangetic Plains since 2012,
to test conservation agriculture based sustainable intensification (CASI) farming
practices.
Throughout the SRFSI project there have been many approaches
used to both understand local systems and monitor the impact of using new
technologies. To complement these, we used a Most Significant Change technique to learn about farmers’ experiences, told in their own words.
“Earlier we could not take decisions but now we do. We can even make our own decisions in the family. Say if there is a decision to be taken about farming then I can sit with my husband and discuss what must be done and what will give us more yield, or what will reduce our expenses. All these we decide for ourselves now.”
The approach used a participatory photo-voting activity to
identify what people felt were the Most Significant Changes to their household
after using CASI approaches.
Farming households pointed to a range of benefits from using
CASI, including for financial, social, physical, human and natural capital.
You can read more about the changes experienced by farmers in this report.