National Farmers Day: Human Initiative Empowers Healthy Agricultural Field Schools

In commemoration of National Farmers Day, today’s article will specifically discuss the farmer empowerment program by the Human Initiative. It is a Sekolah Lapang Pertanian Sehat located in Pasanggrahan Village, Subang. This program is the result of a collaboration between Human Initiative and Aqua Home Service (AHS).

This program exists with the aim of educating farmers in Pasanggrahan Village to switch to the concept of healthy agriculture without the use of pesticides. As the company is geographically located at the bottom, while the rice fields are right above it, if there are too many chemical residues due to the use of pesticides, the environment will certainly be polluted and will hamper the company’s business processes.

Based on an interview with Bustanul Arifin Nasir, as the West Java branch of the Human Initiative team, this Healthy Agricultural Field School has 3 target concentrations:

1. Strengthening the capacity of farmers’ skills in processing organic healthy agriculture
2. Reducing chemical residues in the soil, so that the harvested rice is of higher quality
3. Efforts to market agricultural products

Meanwhile, another hope is the existence of products resulting from healthy agricultural assistance through Oryza Rice which will later receive assistance for marketing the rice. This program has been running since July 2021 and will end at harvest time in November 2021.

Farmers Response

Initially, it was admitted by Kang Bustan, a farmer of Pasanggrahan Village who had tried organic rice cultivation. However, during the first year, they were surprised because the production capacity decreased. This is because there is no use of pesticides at all. So it affects the quantity of the harvest.

Thanks to education and assistance from Human Initiative, farmers believe in trying to retry the healthy farming process with a different marketing system. So far, farmers have only depended on middlemen, so they expect changes in their quality of life to make them more decent.

In addition to the concept of healthy agriculture, it can maintain the beauty of the environment, competitiveness is also more profitable because many community groups have switched to a healthy lifestyle by consuming organic food, rice is one of them. Therefore, the result of the selling price can also be increased by 2-3 times higher.

The farmers at Desa Pasanggrahan, Subang, are very grateful for the Healthy Agricultural Field School program initiated by Human Initiative and are very enthusiastic about participating in the assistance and education provided. Moreover, it is a matter of pride for them to realize that they have contributed to maintaining the beauty of the environment. So, Happy National Farmers Day all!