Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: "Love. They must do it for love." Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss.”
― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food
While iFarmer fosters the vision to construct Bangladesh’s most efficient and largest agri-financing and supply chain platform by improving the livelihoods of the farmers who are our key stakeholders, we - the Impact team at iFarmer are on a constant pursuit to understand the complexities of the farmers’ lives. We want to know what it is like to be a farmer in a land known to be one of the most fertile lands on planet Earth. A land of which over 70% is arable i.e., able to support farming and crops. It is the great fertility of the land and its warm, well-watered climate that continually attracts people, even after devastating floods and cyclones have wrought such great devastation over the years. To the 16.5 million farmers across Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest and densely populated countries, the risks of farming are worth taking. But why and for how long?
The Impact team delved into a 3 months long Ethnographic Research Study across 4 districts to understand our farmers better - experience a day of their lives along with them, identify their behavioral patterns and learn more about their evolving pain points. When we were designing the research study, truth be told, we were not sure how this will benefit us or how we can steer this study to identify what we need to know. The brief I gave to my team was quite simple – “We talk about their pain points that we are trying to address; we work with the solutions we think they need. But who are these people? What drives them to do what they do? Are they happy being farmers? What troubles them enough to keep them up at night? What drags them out of the bed every morning despite knowing they have the most difficult day ahead? If our core work is to measure, evaluate and assess the impact we as an organization are having on these people, we should start by really understanding them. Let’s go and find out who our farmers are.”
Ethnographic research focuses on problems that are identified as important by both the researcher and key people of the research location. The process involves longer term face-to-face interactions with people in the research community. For our study, we set four primary objectives:
- To monitor whether farmers are receiving timely service and assess the effectiveness of all iFarmer services.
- To collect unfiltered feedback from farmers - to evaluate that our services are aligned with farmers’ major current pain points.
- To identify further categorization of farmers (farming experience, environmental drawbacks of their location, farmers who practice agriculture as a secondary occupation, farmers who are relatively wealthier, veteran farmers, young farmers, novice farmers etc.) and qualitatively assess their needs.
- To experience their struggles, decision making processes and their day-to-day activities first-hand, by shadowing or following them for a particular period of time.
This multimethod study was conducted through questionnaire surveys, in-depth interviews, key informant interviews, focus group discussions and context immersion. Our team of 4 members visited Nilphamari, Jashore, Natore and Joypurhat over a period of three months.
#sustainableagriculture #bankfinancing #contractfarming #techstartup #agritech #agrifintech #agribusiness #scaling #farmers #smallholderfarmers #farming #agroecosystem
