Amanda Crump
Description: Amanda Crump is a Professor of International Agricultural Development at UC Davis. Her research focuses on improving agricultural technology adoption for marginalized groups and enhancing learning through innovative teaching. We discuss her work with small-scale farmers in Africa and Southeast Asia, covering food security, mechanization, and youth engagement in farming. She highlights how technology is reshaping agricultural education and why local voices are key to effective aid programs. She also shares advice on driving change in global agriculture through curiosity, collaboration, and innovation.
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Publications:
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Show Notes:
[0:02] Introduction to Professor Amanda Crump
[2:29] Journey to UC Davis
[3:15] A Focus on Global Regions
[5:05] Understanding International Agricultural Systems
[7:33] Youth Engagement in Agriculture
[10:47] Mechanization and Technology in Farming
[16:35] Infrastructure Barriers in Developing Countries
[20:48] Addressing Post-Harvest Loss
[25:01] Research Funding in International Aid
[30:07] Incorporating Local Voices in Development
[36:27] Measuring Success in Aid Programs
[41:51] The Role of Education and Training
[45:12] Peer-to-Peer Learning in Agriculture
[52:01] Including Marginalized Communities
[54:33] Future Strategies for Sustainable Development
[58:30] Policy Sharing and Collaboration
[1:01:19] Advice for Future Change-Makers
Unedited AI Generated Transcript:
Brent:
[0:00] Welcome, Professor Amanda Crump. Thank you for coming on today.
Amanda:
[0:03] Hi, I'm so excited to be here.
Keller:
[0:05] We'd love to start off by hearing a little bit more about what got you interested in international development and how you ended up at UC Davis.
Amanda:
[0:12] Yeah, oh, that's a long story, so I'll try to make it short. But I grew up on a farm and studied agriculture in my undergrad. And after that, I ended up through a series of fortunate events, I think. Meeting people and ending up working in Europe where I worked for the American Red Cross. And that was really my first taste of living internationally and then also working with people who had a dire need. And upon finishing that job, I was trying to figure out, well, what could I do that mixes my love of agriculture and my new interest in working internationally and then also really working with people who are struggling through a disaster or some other stressor. And I had a mentor at the time, and he told me that there's such a field as international agricultural development. So when I went to get a master's degree, I made that as a minor and an emphasis within my master's program.
Amanda:
[1:24] So I ended up here at UC Davis, also kind of by accident. I believe in following your destiny wherever that may take you. And I was married at the time, and my husband had an opportunity to come to Davis. And I knew that I wanted to work internationally. And so I had an informational interview with somebody here on campus to try to understand what California was like And whether I needed to maybe live in San Francisco to be able to work for an organization that did international work. And we had a really great conversation. And two weeks later, UC Davis received a really large grant that they is called the Horticulture Innovation Lab, which we still have here on campus. And that gentleman called me and asked me to come work for him. And so the rest is history. I've been at UC Davis since 2009. And I initially started off working at the Horticulture Innovation Lab as a
Amanda:
[2:25] staff member and became the associate director there. And then transitioned away from that and became a faculty member in 2018.
Brent:
[2:38] Where did you go with the Red Cross?
Amanda:
[2:40] I lived in Germany, and so we were primarily responsible for working in the Balkans. So this was the 90s, and Yugoslavia had broken up. And so they had reached an agreement between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, but there were still problems in Kosovo. And so a lot of the aid work was around those wars at the time and then there were a couple of earthquakes and things in.
Brent:
[3:15] And it seems that a lot of your work has also started to focus more on Southeast Asia and Africa. What got you interested in those other regions?
Amanda:
[3:22] Yeah, I think that comes from my work at the Horticulture Innovation Lab. And so we were able to work in several different countries. And over time, I've worked in 37 different countries. And most of those have been in Africa and Southeast Asia.
Amanda:
[3:42] In those parts of the world there are a lot of subsistence level farmers and a lot of women farmers and i always wanted to work with women farmers my mom is a woman farmer my mom was always one of the um she probably did more work on the farm than my father did and i always just really respected that and wanted to help others that were farming like that. And so in the Horticulture Innovation Lab, my job was to work with scientists who were developing innovations for farmers and to work with them on the social side. And so any innovation, we would work together to look at how that innovation impacted people who were different genders or who had different abilities or might be from a different cast or class or even a different age. So how could we take the same innovation and make it work for young girls or people who are living with a disability? And so that was...
Amanda:
[4:56] Was what we did. Um, and, and primarily our work was in Africa and in Southeast Asia.
Brent:
[5:04] That's amazing.
Amanda:
[5:05] Yeah.
Keller:
[5:06] And before diving further into your research, what should the audience understand about the international agricultural system?
Amanda:
[5:11] Yeah. So it's, it's different than what you would think. Um, but at the heart, I still feel like when I meet farmers, they, they have the same concerns that farmers here do. So we were talking about it earlier but we believe there's about one and a half billion farmers or people who are making some sort of living off of a farm and most of those farmers work on small scale farms we're talking like less than a hectare and overall most of the food comes from really small-scale farmers. And the majority of those are women. So sometimes in the United States, when we think about a farmer, we have an image of a man and he might be wearing overalls or whatever this image is in our head.
Brent:
[6:00] Big tractors.
Amanda:
[6:01] Big tractors. Yeah. Although that's not really what farmers are like here either, but you know how we make it. And so when we make interventions that are appropriate for farmers, we often set out with an image in our mind that isn't really what that farmer is. And so a lot of people are subsistence-level farmers. They are accessing local markets instead of larger regional markets or even export markets. And so the technologies have to really change for those types of scale. Yeah.
Keller:
[6:41] Yeah. And that might not be like an easy, broad scope question, but how much of those farms are mechanized or have some version of mechanization?
Amanda:
[6:51] I would say that maybe the, I would say the majority of them have some sort of mechanization, but it's going to be smaller scale, right? And some of the mechanization will be shared among farmers. So a farmer group might own a small scale tiller that they can walk around, walk behind, kind of similar to what a rototiller would be that we might use in our gardens here. And so having, or they might share irrigation equipment or share a pump. So there's going to be some of that mechanization, but not that large scale
Amanda:
[7:27] mechanization that we envision here with as large attractors that we have.
Brent:
[7:33] Yeah and then with your work in like these different areas have you seen a concern over the younger generation not being as interested in agriculture because for us when we were in indonesia like we visited a pretty small village that was having an art festival and part of the art was like, that's halfway art but halfway useful for like the farms in the community and they're showing like how to like try to like get the younger generation a little bit more excited because especially now like all the technology like cell phones they're ubiquitous and people are are seeing youtube and like other like like different ways of making money and now they're really concerned about the younger generation like who's going to be making the food for us.
Amanda:
[8:17] Yes i think that Not only do I have this concern, but a lot of people have this concern. In fact, this morning, I was on a phone call with people who live in Malawi, and the partner that was talking there had just done a survey of village chiefs in Malawi. And those village chiefs had expressed to him their desire to get students who are young people from their village who have gone off to college to get them back into their communities and so, I think this is a big concern for a lot of different people similar to what you just said Like how I've even heard people say we need to make agriculture sexy again or exciting for young people.
Brent:
[9:10] That's really funny. When I wrote this question, I did like hashtag make ag sexy again. And like we took it out before we sent it to you. That's hilarious that you sent that.
Amanda:
[9:21] No, they really have said that.
Brent:
[9:22] Yeah.
Amanda:
[9:24] And I grew up on a farm, and my brother and I couldn't return to that farm, or chose not to return to that farm. And as a result, my parents don't farm anymore. And I think that that's the story of a lot of rural young people, is that efficiencies of scale kind of take charge, and then definitely agriculture is aging. And they see that in lower income countries, too, not just in the United States. But I think that there's some really great things that we can do to make agriculture sexy, I guess, but to make it interesting, because there are so many opportunities along the entire value chain of agriculture that we can harness technology to figure out how to do in a better way. And that can really make good paying jobs for people and give people an opportunity to return to their rural communities. So there's opportunities in, for instance, um.
Amanda:
[10:40] Opportunities in irrigation or other kinds of infrastructure that I think are going to be really important to making it interesting.
Amanda:
[10:48] Here at UC Davis, our department has what we call a smart farm, which is a farm that has a lot of different kinds of sensors that helps farmers make decisions. And while it's experimental in our department, those types of applications of having a cell phone and being able to know whether your crop needs water at that moment or where the best market is for your product at any given time. I think those are really great opportunities for to get young people excited as well. But I think it's going to take a whole village approach where communities or villages really recognize that they need to bring people back into their communities and they might have to do things such as helping them pay for school and then maybe we could have systems like we have here where if you in the united states if you teach in a rural community you have some of your school loans returned to you right i think those kinds of things could happen in agriculture if we would just be creative and and i also think that that youth are really creative and could come up with some of those solutions themselves but um but i'm definitely concerned as well and so are other people at the age of farmers all throughout the.
Brent:
[12:15] World yeah that makes sense.
Keller:
[12:17] Do you think centralization has to happen in order to make agriculture more productive at like a large scale because obviously like we talked about like there are millions of farmers a lot of them really small plots that aren't connected they might be accessing different markets. Is there a way to balance centralizing those markets or commercializing them while also not disenfranchising the farmers?
Amanda:
[12:42] Yeah, I think that that is one of the things that I wish I had a better answer to, because certainly there's economic and market drivers that really encourage us to, as agriculturalists to save money, right? And to benefit from those economies of scale. But I think if we use the United States as an example, or even European farms as examples, there are some strategies that the government has put in place in order to encourage smaller farms to be able to thrive. And so I think we need to look at prioritizing farmers in a in our policy systems, In order to make sure that the things we value as far as ensuring that people have good paying jobs that they really enjoy and that they can do them in rural communities, if that's going to be our priority, I think we have to build policies around it. Because if we just simply leave it to the economics of scale, then, of course, being efficient and being big is going to be one of those economies of scale.
Brent:
[14:00] Have you seen any examples in the U.S. where, because I know like every election cycle, the candidates go out to these communities like farmers are the backbone of the United States. It's like, have you seen policy remotely reflect that those sentiments or is it more just a marketing like campaign tool?
Amanda:
[14:19] Yeah, I don't know if I've seen anything totally concrete. The U.S. Department of Agriculture does have a rural development center and a rural development agency. And within that, there are regional centers that do try to do that for rural communities. Um the biggest one thing that i think rural communities are lacking in the united states are just simple things that we take for granted here in larger communities such as access to broadband right um good roads and school infrastructure and health care um so i've been a part of a number of conversations where they talk about how rural communities don't have places for adequate healthcare and that hospitals are closing down. And so I think there have been recent efforts in this last administration to increase broadband. And I think that that's probably the most solid example I can think of recently. But I really think that looking at these infrastructure investments that we could do in rural communities is important. And I think that's important also in other countries. So in other countries, um.
Amanda:
[15:46] Cell phone infrastructure has just been really great. And so more people have phones now than they ever did. And that's because the expense of laying landlines was so high compared to what a cell phone tower can be. And so now people have phones and they can be more connected and they can be connected to markets. And that's really opening up a lot of opportunities. And I think Like maybe if we could do that for our own communities in the United States, that would be really nice.
Brent:
[16:20] And in those foreign countries, do you think physical infrastructure is like a pretty big barrier for like getting connected to the larger markets? Because a lot of places that we've traveled to, it's like you're getting on dirt roads and it's like hard. Like how do you get them tapped into the other market?
Brent:
[16:35] Because one, we were in China and like a rural, we went to talk to a professor who did rural development. It and i think china as a they have incredible infrastructure overall so they'll take this like little tiny village and sell the like package the rice sell it like package the fruit and sell it to a larger uh market so do you think those types of like simple as like roads airports like other physical infrastructure is probably like a larger barrier yeah.
Amanda:
[17:03] I think there's two barriers and one of them is definitely roads and infrastructure like that. I've been told that before. I was once in Honduras doing an assessment of horticulture and what would be a good avenue to get horticultural crops to export. And we did a lot of meetings. And this gentleman who was a trucker, he said, you know what, Amanda, the problem is that there are 47 speed bumps between where I pick up the tomatoes and where I drop them off. And if you think that a tomato looks the same by the time it goes through the speed bumps, you're wrong.
Amanda:
[17:43] And so sometimes it's as simple as that. There's also interesting tax laws that don't make sense sometimes in countries. And the way we tax agricultural products in certain countries can be... Can kind of make it so that our markets aren't as robust. So an example of that comes from Sub-Saharan Africa and a project that we were doing in Tanzania. And we were trying to, as a horticulture innovation lab, one of our key emphasis areas was on post-harvest handling. And so how could we make it so that the produce that was picked was still fresh in the market so that people could get a better price and in a lot of places they lack cooling um you know there's no cold chain and not a reliable electricity but one small thing that people can do is use appropriate packaging that doesn't hurt the the produce right and so we've seen that in our grocery stores there might be like really nice asian pears might be individually wrapped here right and um so what we had been seeing in the market and this was again with tomatoes.
Amanda:
[19:06] Was that farmers were putting tomatoes in these big bags that were maybe like two or three feet tall and about i would say a foot and a half wide and then putting those in their trucks and taking them to the market. And the tomatoes on the bottom of the bags are tomato sauce, right? And so we were trying to say, well, let's implement plastic crates because plastic crates can be cleaned, they can be sanitary, they can be reused, and they won't scuff up the sides of the tomatoes. And so we had a whole list of reasons why that would work. When we sat down with stakeholders, we learned that farmers are taxed on the number of packages that they transport.
Amanda:
[19:58] And so the same amount of tomatoes can fit into two of those three foot tall bags, but about 10 of those crates. And so if you're going to be taxed on two things versus 10 things, you can see what the decision is going to be. So I think a big part of what we could do as researchers or people working with agriculturalists is to look at that policy environment around all aspects of agriculture. Are there tariffs that make it so that we can't import certain types of seeds? Are there other kinds of protectionist policies in place that make it.
Brent:
[20:46] Hard for them? Yeah, certainly.
Keller:
[20:48] And broadly within agriculture, you mentioned the post-harvest. How big of a barrier to the overall food supply is that? Because I know in different parts of it, post-harvest yield loss can be 40%. Is that something that if we focused on that, maybe as opposed to agricultural technologies themselves, that alone could get us closer to our goals of feeding the world?
Amanda:
[21:12] Yeah, I think so. I think focusing on food loss and waste is very important. And then also, I think in order to meet our climate goals, we've got to also look at kind of like the circular economy. How do we take waste and then put that into use in an appropriate way? But you're right. I've heard those numbers between 40 and 80% of food is lost either at harvest or before it gets to our plates or in our homes. And in Western nations, we tend to waste things in our homes. in our homes. And in lower income countries, those things don't make it to the two people's homes because of the lack of cold chain or even the lack of dry chain. So in humid places, it's hard to keep things dry and mold can happen and destroy them as well. So one thing that UC Davis has been working on is really emphasizing post-harvest handling, whether it's through maintaining a cold chain or maintaining a dry chain. And I think that's really key. And then being able to reuse the waste that happens throughout the system in order to kind of mitigate some of the climate change of.
Brent:
[22:42] I remember like Indonesia, I think they were, they burn off a lot of like the sugarcane after they do it. And so like we were in Singapore for a study abroad and there's just a season of burning where it drifts up to there. And I think some people we talked to is like, they're trying to use that for biofuels now. And so like collecting all of the like sugarcane waste and like transition and make it a fuel source out of it. But overall, would you say like at a global level, majority of the food waste is between harvest and like the consumption? And less post like, oh, like poor handling or something went moldy once they got to the house.
Amanda:
[23:18] Yeah, I think that the waste that we see in our households is kind of a first world problem, quote unquote, right? And that might be more of a purchasing problem or a consumption problem. I i saw recently that in california they're going to change the best by date rules which is really confusing right eliminating confusion from the system would probably help with a lot of.
Brent:
[23:51] Waste yeah and i also know that there's there's good like videos on instagram or tiktok like you could actually like if you store your food like this it lasts three times longer in your fridge or like We refrigerate this thing, but it really shouldn't be. And just it accelerates the degeneration of the plant or whatever.
Amanda:
[24:09] Yeah.
Brent:
[24:10] But.
Amanda:
[24:11] Yeah, I think we're really far removed from our food.
Brent:
[24:14] Yes.
Amanda:
[24:15] And eating seasonally, I think, could help a lot too. But when you see those ranges of numbers that we waste 40 to 80 percent, the 80 percent numbers come from places that lack electricity, that have poor infrastructure for roads and don't have those sophisticated market systems that are kind of like a hub and spoke, system yeah the more efficient we can make the market system the the better that that works for us because like as soon as you harvest the crop it starts deteriorating and so getting it to a consumer quickly and in good shape is going to be key for that consumer being able to use it.
Keller:
[25:01] And stepping out towards international aid broadly it's kind of in the same light as like the complexities of the policy, but within the billions, hundreds of billions of dollars that are going to aid, how much of that is being spent on the research of the intervention programs themselves and not just blanket funding?
Amanda:
[25:19] Yeah, I actually looked this up because I was really curious about this. So I learned that we spend $45 billion, this is the United States, on international development programs every year and that it's less that it's in the like 25 million dollars a year or something it was in research um i think it's a little bit more than that but so we're talking you know less than five percent is spent on research and for those of us who research international development i think that's a really big hurdle that we have Love.
Amanda:
[26:03] In some ways, we've been doing development in the exact same way that we did in the 1960s. And while that development has come from a lot of good will and a lot of good heart, where we wanted to make differences for people who are living in poverty, we really haven't made a lot of jumps in cutting poverty or increasing people's nutritional outcomes. And I think part of that is that we don't really take time to do research on how to do it a little bit better and to look for those examples that are happening already and then try to figure out how to magnify them. So sometimes there is research done as part of an impact assessment. So you might do a project and then conduct research afterwards. But even that in our international development projects is budgeted at about 10% of the project is to do that impact assessment.
Amanda:
[27:11] And I think another key thing would be to connect people who do development projects to each other a little bit better. There's very little time to sit around a table and do the lessons learned conversation. And especially if what you've done didn't work out really well, it's really hard to have that honest conversation about something that didn't work very well. yeah.
Brent:
[27:40] No that makes sense.
Amanda:
[27:42] Yeah but I think it should be increased the amount of money we spend on research.
Keller:
[27:46] Is there a movement among researchers to push for that like are there reasons beyond just tradition that that number has stayed low.
Amanda:
[27:54] Um I don't know I mean I feel like those of us who are doing work in international development research do hope for more research funding to do that, But I wonder if there's just not enough of us. We have only one or two journals that we publish in. And as a field of study, people who research development are already disciplined. They have a discipline of their own. So I'm a sociologist. So I might only publish in journals that are related to sociology or education. And not always publish in international development journals. So I think we lack that. We lack a cohesive research community as well because we might be economists or sociologists or biophysical scientists trying to do that work.
Brent:
[28:57] And then how often do you think the international development researchers are collaborating with people, working on creating new technologies or making sure that these new up-and-coming stuff will actually be effective when implemented into the field?
Amanda:
[29:11] I think it happens a little bit, but not as often as it should. What I hope happens on my end, because I don't have the opportunity to be involved in a lot of different projects, I find that there are research projects that I get involved in, And maybe I might end up on a consulting board or something for a bigger development project. But what I try to do is train my students who are going to go out and work on development projects, how to be a little bit more curious and to ask some more questions and to try to bring in different perspectives into their work. So I don't think to answer your question I don't think it happens very often but I think there's opportunities for this next generation of development practitioners
Amanda:
[30:05] to do something differently yeah.
Brent:
[30:08] And then how often does this community like take into account like the stakeholder like what their true needs are what are they like really looking for to get out of aid and does that message get relayed back to the people actually designing the aid programs.
Amanda:
[30:22] I would say that But it is getting better at incorporating local voices into what a development program should look like.
Amanda:
[30:37] But we have to look at the main audience for any kind of aid. So because U.S. aid is paid for by American taxpayers, they need to see something as a result of their contribution through their taxes. And as a result of that a lot of projects are designed by Americans and they might be sitting in Washington DC and not really be in the local community there are of course Americans working abroad and trying to get the voices of many people into those programs the COVID-19 pandemic actually was good for this part of development i think so what happened is we were forced to stay home right and it gave westerners this opportunity to realize that life goes on without them being in the country and intervening and i think to trust people a little bit more that were on their teams. And so I've really seen a shift in the types of requests for proposals that we're seeing come from the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Amanda:
[32:00] I'm currently reading a request for proposals now, and there's a big section on how you will ensure that the intervention is locally led you know how will you have local stakeholders have a really good input into that decision and so i'm seeing that and that's really neat yeah because when i first started working in development we talked about participatory development and it kind of took the need like the form of a needs assessment but maybe not all of those ideas were always incorporated into the actual work and i feel more positive about that now that's baby steps right um but i think yeah i think, Especially younger people are really wanting to incorporate other kinds of ideas and maybe challenge the system and do something different.
Keller:
[33:00] In looking at, because you mentioned the taxpayers wanting to see the results of the program, what are some of the ways that success is measured in international aid programs? Whether that be metrics or timeframes, how do you, because the input most of the time is dollars. I think most people understand that part, but how to track that, when those timeframes are, I don't know how clear that is.
Amanda:
[33:25] Yeah, I think that's a very good question. So in terms of timeframes, a lot of international projects are three to five years in length. And if we talk about a five-year project, we might be still hiring people for that first year. And then that last year, we're just ramping it down and trying to transition that office into something new. And so you really only have like three years to do something and it just takes a lot longer. I mean, an agricultural cycle is one year, so you only get to do something three times.
Amanda:
[34:03] So I think that's a challenge. But they have tried to consolidate the types of data that we collect so that data that I collect in my project can be added to data that are collected in another project. So they, U.S. Agency for International Development and under the Feed the Future program, have a set of indicators that they're looking at, and they have very clear ways of measuring them. So they're interested in things such as how many technologies get adopted, how many people are learning about those technologies, what kinds of behaviors are they exhibiting afterwards, and then there's specific.
Amanda:
[34:50] Indicators around nutrition and the amount of stunting or wasting that you might see in children. So when we implement a development project, we're able to choose from that list of indicators what we would like to measure. And then we measure them in a similar way to another project so that they can say in the end, with American taxpayer money, we were able to, as a whole, you know feed so many people or improve roads or whatever that might be yeah so that has really changed that happened um within the time that i've been working in development a bigger effort to measure the impact of programs and to know exactly what's happening because of that money yeah yeah i think that's a really positive thing.
Keller:
[35:43] Yeah and then just really quickly you mentioned And stunting, could you just define that?
Amanda:
[35:47] Yeah, I think so. So a stunted child is a child that is shorter and weighs less than average for their age. So if we look at, we use Z scores for that. So are you one standard deviation lower than the average age for a child? And so stunting is often measured between the ages of zero and five, I believe. I could have that a little bit wrong, but that's the gist of it is that a child
Amanda:
[36:22] is shorter and lighter than an average person.
Brent:
[36:28] Yeah. And then kind of similar to measuring the success of an age program, what do you think some of the biggest barriers are to a new technology or a new program being fully adopted by the local community?
Amanda:
[36:41] Yeah, I- think that inherently as people we when we develop something new we get really excited if like 85% of the people adopt it right like I have a widget and 85% of the people are buying my widget and what I think is our biggest failure especially when it comes to lower income folks is that we kind of ignore the 15% of the people who didn't buy the widget and say.
Amanda:
[37:20] Well, they just don't want to adopt that. And I think it's on us to change our widget so that it fits those people. And I kind of feel like if we knew what those 15% non-adopters were like, like what those barriers are for them to adopt that technology, then I think we could design it for that in mind so if we're taking the example of women and we want to build something that would work for women right we might think about how they use their time like are we building something that adds extra time to their day or adds extra labor if we are saving them labor what are they doing with that labor are they just asked to do something differently or do they get some leisure time you know so i think i think really evaluating those trade-offs are really important i.
Brent:
[38:20] Think uh the sierra leone example was a pretty good one about like whether or not like like the cooking conditions and all of that could you explain like that and how you measured that outcome.
Amanda:
[38:30] Yeah that was really interesting so we published this paper on the potential for ethanol cookstoves to be adopted in Sierra Leone, which has a really big crisis looming as far as deforestation. And the... What we saw was that there were some definite trade-offs. So we implemented a small-scale pilot project within communities and within homes where households were given a stove and they were given fuel for two weeks. And then after that, we asked them to pay a smaller rate for that fuel. And then eventually, we wanted to measure whether they would pay for that out of, you know, whether they would find the technology so appealing that they would pay for it. And we found a lot of interesting trade-offs so first of all sometimes when we were introducing the concept you know like holding a holding a meeting and saying we're gonna do this experiment, there were some husbands that found it to be really prestigious to be part of this project right and so they brought their.
Amanda:
[39:53] These cook stoves home, and they handed them to their wives, and their wives were like, no, I didn't ask for this, and they might be having a disagreement anyway, and so they refused to use them because they were mad at the husband.
Amanda:
[40:11] Some things we learned about design was that the stoves themselves weren't necessarily good. They only had one burner, and the way that people in Sierra Leone cook is with multiple burners. They might have a starch going at the same time they have vegetables and the same time they might have a sauce. And so only having one burner was the limit. And yeah, and then a lot of people would only use them for short periods of time to like maybe boil water, but not to replace all of their other cooking needs. So that was really interesting study and it was done by a graduate student here and she traveled and lived there and then did those market assessments with a partner with a former Humphrey fellow that had been at UC Davis.
Brent:
[41:05] Yeah I think that also just illustrates like how important like more time, is because you come in with this idea you think it's going to work oh it didn't work and then that might be the three years that it took and then so just extending that time and research to be able to iterate with the communities probably.
Amanda:
[41:21] Yeah, I think so. And being able to design it with the community. And I don't think this made it into the paper, but we did look into local design. And in fact, one of the, there was an undergraduate student that traveled as well, and he tried to build one there with local materials. And it was, it didn't turn out as pretty as the purchased one. And so a lot of the women said that they wouldn't buy one that wasn't pretty.
Amanda:
[41:51] But I do think if we're going to invest, if we're going to say we need to figure out how to implement newer, better stoves into any country, I do think we need to have a longer term effort around that.
Keller:
[42:09] And with newer technologies, I mean, we're using the example of a stove, but it could be our cultural technologies or it could be energy technologies. Is the introduction phase like the most critical, whether it be through the design or, you know, the supply chain? Is that first step of initially introducing the most important of who will like it? Or is it after that who ends up not liking it after a certain period?
Amanda:
[42:35] Yeah, I think that that's a really good question. But I think maybe I would back us up into even do they need it, right? Like, what problem is it trying to solve? and and I, For this example, the problem it's trying to solve is deforestation, but I don't think that average people who live in Sierra Leone are as concerned about deforestation as maybe their leaders are or those of us in another country. And so I really think that to get any kind of innovation out, it's got to really start by what is the need that it's really addressing? And then I think the design, I think it needs to be designed with those stakeholders engaged all the time before it gets implemented. Yeah.
Brent:
[43:30] Because one thing I thought about when we were traveling, just you see all these people and they're working super hard to try to get their livelihood and all that. And then if you come in like, hey, this is a more energy efficient way to do the same thing you're already doing. That's such a low priority for so many people. We're struggling just to survive here. so that's where i'm kind of thinking like how do we solve their needs and show them like not only like like number one this will make your life better you'll make more money or like whatever it is and then number two like there's an added benefit to like actually helping out a broader scale issue.
Amanda:
[44:06] Yeah and i think that's just human's inherent dismissive of risk right it's so easy to keep doing what you're doing because doing something different could be risky and when you're really trying to like you're living at that edge it's really hard to take on that risk and that's what things like insurance does or loans or grants that helps people take on a little bit more risk and so I think that that's a good opportunity but yeah the priorities I think sometimes are a big mismatch.
Keller:
[44:45] And then with these new technologies, kind of after they get implemented, assuming the needs meet and they are actually of use, part of the importance of sustainability is the education piece. Could you explain a little bit more on how those programs are generally designed, whether that be in a specific sector, just broadly how you go about making these
Keller:
[45:07] training programs so that there isn't just a product without any capability to use it?
Amanda:
[45:13] Yeah, thanks for asking that. That's something that my research team is really focused on is how to improve training and agricultural extension. And so we've done a lot of research on agricultural extension and the best practices to do that outreach for different folks. And we've also been really looking at farmer field schools and so can uh can farmers come together in a learning environment and do and start learning together in a safe way you know like maybe growing things on a on a university farm or on a on a research farm that where they're not assuming the risk, and then taking those skills and going out into their own communities, being successful, and then teaching other people. So I think that's probably one of the best strategies to figuring out how to best teach people.
Amanda:
[46:22] A lot of countries have agricultural extension educators. We have extension agents here in California, too. And they are severely underfunded and under-resourced. So in a lot of countries, they're unable to travel extensively to meet with clients. And they're routinely asked to do more with less. So we worked in a previous project that I had, we worked in Zambia, and we worked with agricultural extension. And we learned that an agricultural extension agent might be an expert in soil science, but because there's no experts in nutrition near them, they all of a sudden have to take on teaching about nutrition too. And so they felt really overwhelmed and not really well supported. And so what we did is we worked UC Davis partnered with the government of Zambia and developed a list of nutrition messages that would be easy for anybody to disseminate. And we gave them tools that they could use in order to disseminate those messages without burdening their time extra.
Brent:
[47:44] Yeah yeah and then when you start educating like the local communities like how hard is it to like educate them by traveling to them versus because i feel like it would be a lot easier like bring them to the university but then now they're not on the farm now they're not working like now they're not making money so like how do we like kind of bridge that gap are you seeing like different technologies aiding in that like education process yeah.
Amanda:
[48:08] I mean i think that's definitely a challenge because and it limits it limits women's ability to access education because they might not have child care when they're coming to a different place and so what i've seen a lot of organizations start to move to is peer-to-peer learning.
Brent:
[48:29] Where.
Amanda:
[48:30] They bring peers onto from farms onto new farms and they have an exchange a conversation around what's happening there and then, The advent of having more access to technology has been really useful. So we were part of a project evaluating a call center that was in Western Africa. So it was in Ghana. And an NGO had started this agricultural call-in center. And they employed a number of different types of experts. and they were able to hire people who could speak all of the languages within Ghana.
Amanda:
[49:16] And farmers would just call in and be like, this is my problem. And they would together as a, you know, they were really sitting in a room and talking to each other and trying to solve the problems on the phone. And so I think, and that was before everybody really had a lot of cell phones that we could take images with but i think now with especially with ai technology right a farmer can take a picture of an insect and know what that is and i think that is gonna i think that's gonna change a lot of the way that training happens and then it's my hope that all we have to do as extension educators is teach people how to learn. You know, how do you judge the correct information, right? Instead of what the correct information is. So that when somebody logs onto the internet and says, you know, why does my tomato look like this? They are able to discern among all of the answers, you know, what's appropriate for them. So that's what my hope is, is that.
Amanda:
[50:32] New technology especially ai can get us to that point where all we have to do is teach people how to learn about science and then they they can do that on their own and i think that would make it so that we wouldn't have to have these intensive like off-farm experiences yeah.
Keller:
[50:49] And do you feel like farmers are generally like if you can get access to information that is pretty clear cut it's not like too biased they are willing to take that information and bring it into the farm Because I know like something I looked at, we talked about before is like the traditional methods of farming and what might be the quote unquote correct way to do it according to science. They might not always line up and there might be a weird kind of dynamic between the two. Have you seen any of that in these education programs?
Amanda:
[51:16] Yeah, I think that, so one of my colleagues also always talks about how trust has to be a big part of educational programs and that that's why the peer-to-peer learning really works because you're able to show that something works on your farm and so that could work on another farm. I i think that's key like trust in the person delivering the message, trust that the trust and understanding that the new technology is going to work
Amanda:
[51:53] for you so i do think that peer-to-peer learning really works yeah i think i think that's key.
Brent:
[52:02] Yeah and then how can like agricultural education better include like voices of like marginalized communities.
Amanda:
[52:09] Yeah, I think it's really important to, well, first of all, I think we should hire more people who reflect those marginalized communities. One barrier to working in agricultural extension in a lower income country is that you need to have a college degree. And it's becoming increasingly difficult for rural students to get a college degree, especially in some countries, because it's expensive, it's very far away from where they live. And so that type of professionalism only happens from people who have the ability to access education. So I think that could be key, is making it so that agricultural extensionists or agricultural teachers also reflect those people, so that they are rural people, so that they are women, so that they might be older and have a lifetime of experiences.
Amanda:
[53:12] That's really important i also think that it's important to figure out where people are along the like what the what is keeping them from adopting something and and and how could they learn about that in a better way um yeah and i think just asking them i think is important you know adding in that participation that we talked about earlier yeah.
Brent:
[53:41] Do you think that that's a bigger thing is like trying to get them like wanting to participate in removing the barriers for participation versus like at a more systematic level like us not hiring them.
Amanda:
[53:54] I think that i think it's really both yeah i think that extension and education has to be accessible like we have to provide child care for mothers in order to get mothers there We also have to ask the appropriate questions like, would you use this technology or do you see this as a problem as we see it? But then I think that to get at that trust piece, it really has to come down to hiring the right people who reflect those communities so that they can better trust them.
Keller:
[54:34] Then looking out towards the future we've talked about a bunch of different versions of ways of ensuring sustainable development what are some of you know in your opinion what are the key things you're looking at that you think if we can improve upon these things this will allow sustainable development especially in countries that might not be like it's not the u.s not just making sure our culture here is working but in countries that might not even have enough workers to farm the fields they have or countries that are still developing broadly in the economy what what are they what should we look at.
Amanda:
[55:07] Yeah i think that one thing we're not talking about enough is climate change and when we do talk about climate change we are talking about how to react to climate change and to the, the things that are happening as a result of climate change. So how to bounce back after a typhoon or how to, yeah, how to rebuild after a fire.
Amanda:
[55:36] I don't think we are focusing enough on transforming farming systems to make them resilient to climate change.
Amanda:
[55:48] And I think that that's what is going to be key to making this sustainable And ensuring that people can remain on their farms and that we have enough to eat. So what that means to me is that we have to make it easier for farmers to change their cropping systems, right? Not just they should be able to have diversified cropping systems. They should be able to capitalize on the waste along the value chain. They should be able to invest money into their homes and communities so that their communities can be a little bit more resilient. So I think that's going to be our key sustainable development strategy is really looking at a systems approach to the whole system from seeds to harvest to eating and figuring out what policies we need in order to transform those systems into more climate smart systems, right? Like, can a farmer who is on a small hectare of land plant several different crops at the same time to ensure that one of those crops is going to make them money?
Amanda:
[57:07] And can they be assured that they can buy insurance that can pay them in times of a climate crisis? You know, what are those types of out-of-the-box thinking? I think it's going to be key for sustainable development.
Brent:
[57:24] Yeah. And do you think there's enough focus within the design stage of what can we do to not only make it more resilient or better for climate, but also make it a clear choice to these stakeholders? Not only is it better in the long run, but this will just benefit you now pretty much immediately.
Amanda:
[57:43] Yeah i can we do that our hashtag make agriculture um i do think that i i think agriculture has to be that those solutions have to be challenging and exciting yeah and that they have to feel doable right that there's not some policy keeping you down and making it so that you can't be innovative and in that way.
Keller:
[58:12] And then one cool question, you mentioned policy a few times now, like at the policy level, are there ways of kind of bringing those policies around to different countries, whether it be in Africa or Asia or even the US?
Keller:
[58:26] Like, is there a central body, maybe like the UN that gives advice on policy? Like, how does that happen in a way that it's not just country X is going to adopt a policy that's great and innovative, and then it's going to take 20 years for the rest of the world to catch up? Is there any kind of system to kind of share those policy advice?
Amanda:
[58:46] Not that I know of, but that sounds like a really great idea. We do get, there are think tanks out there that are examining policies. So one of my former students worked in Malawi and she developed a list of like climate smart strategies for recommendations for the Malawian government. And somebody in a think tank picked that up somehow and ended up in a list of six things that Malawi should adopt in order to fix their agricultural system, right? And hers was focused on extension. And so I do think, A, making sure that our information as researchers is accessible, right? We need to make sure we're publishing in open access journals.
Amanda:
[59:39] And then I always encourage my students to not only publish a thesis and, you know, a peer-reviewed article, but to also make their research into something for the community. And so this particular student who had worked in Malawi, she developed six webinars for people within the Malawi government, and she made policy briefs. So her thesis was like 80 pages long, and she made it into six one-page things, briefs. And then she did a webinar. It was during COVID. I think she would have preferred to go to Malawi. But she did a series of webinars where she gave those briefs to the stakeholders. So she gave it to the Ministry of Agriculture and the people in charge of extension. And so I think that made a big difference, too. So I think it's partly on us to take our research and make it digestible for policymakers so that they don't have to read our research language, right? But I also think that really ensuring that, publications are in other languages that they're um open access is key yeah.
Brent:
[1:01:01] Then hopefully technology will continue to make that easier because now translation is super easy and just we'll be able to like not like people who might not be great at art might be able to create infographics like ai and like those types of things to like share the information easier so yeah hopefully that continues to get better yeah.
Amanda:
[1:01:17] And people can summarize with ai.
Brent:
[1:01:19] Yeah i think that's really important yeah but uh as we kind of like wrap up here like do you have any broader advice to maybe people like here students or people who are they see the need for this and they want to be passionate but they might not know like what the next best steps are just like how to get involved like maybe how to like understand a different culture better like design things properly yeah.
Amanda:
[1:01:43] I think asking good questions is the first thing i always encourage students to go to the farmer's market and not just buy from the farmers, but ask them questions, talk to them, and get to know them, right? I feel like being inquisitive is really important. I also really think that this generation of young people, they're really fun to teach because I think that they're very inquisitive and the level of critique they have for the status quo is great. And I think we should keep doing that. There has to be people who say to ourselves, there has to be a better way. And instead of complaining about it, actually doing it. But I think it starts with getting to know your community better, getting to know those farmers better and start talking and asking questions.
Brent:
[1:02:40] Wonderful.
Keller:
[1:02:40] Thank you so much for your time.
Amanda:
[1:02:42] Thanks for having me.