By creating and maintaining community based cold storage facilities or AC rooms in the field and establishing connectivity to nearby market place.
To sustainably realize your community-based on-farm conservation of fruit crops, you first of all need to brainstorm this issue with local opinion leaders and/or those farmers who are engaged in farming of these fruit crops in order to use their indigenous knowledge on how to preserve such fruit crops for sale and food. This is because any method which you may propose, it will only be successful if and only if the locals are ready to adopt such an approach. As an ethno-ecologist, I always do appreciate local knowledge and how valuable their own interventions are. It will even interest you to know of innovative ways to conserve such fruit crops from the locals themselves, which you may not have thought of.
That being said, you need to have a multi-faceted approach to making this happen. Thus, various stakeholders should be brought on board to deal with availability of physical infrastructure like road network, electricity accessibility, ready local market, etc.
In many parts of the country, it has been a traditional practice to plant a fruit tree in their home garden. In context to that, free distribution of plants for home garden (with a condition not to cut down before informing) and geo-tagging them with websites like yardmap (or indigenous software) can help for sustainable on farm conservation.
Conservation with proper management, multiplication, distribution, registration etc are the activities to save biodiversity of crops in the area.
Interesting question . Though , on-farm conservation in many tribal areas, is more like a tradition than a practice , because tribals get back the required additional nutrition for the family , livelihood, ..and while doing so the objectivity of on-farm conservation is inadvertantly meted out..But , unless farming community finds the utility of those germplasm in their day-to-day life, on-farm conservation of so far diversity will still be some distance away from fulfillment ...
Interesting ...
Agricultural biodiversity, in particular the local diversity of crops and their wild relatives, plays a significant role in the livelihoods of the most vulnerable farmers. This diversity is the biological basis for ensuring food security of smallholder farmers and provides the raw materials needed to help them adapt to future challenges such as climate change. Unfortunately, these very resources are being threatened and even lost at an alarming pace as a result of changing markets, farming practices and environmental degradation. Conventionally, agricultural biodiversity has been conserved in genebanks. To protect the full range of diversity, conserving crop diversity on farm and in the wild is imperative for its continued evolution and selective adaptation to respond to future challenges. Some indicators of success:
- increase in the percentage and quality of on-farm management areas and also conservation sites in the wild;
- global conservation programme developed and applied on at least 30 crops and their wild relatives in five locations on three continents (Africa, Asia and
Latin America).
- local institutional mechanisms developed for on -farm conservation
Some PDFs enclosed for further reading...
We worked with these descriptors with Dr Paul Queck and successfully modified it
A truly sustainable system will rely heavily on a local system in all its facets. For instance, many so called sustainable systems, including certified organic systems are heavily fossil fuel mitigated. All aspects of the system require a perpetual cycle, so finite resources by definition cannot be part of a sustainable system.
In a local community, and sustainable model, it is also commonly forgotten that commerce is important. For example, the idea of free exchange of goods (like plant stock for instance) is likely to be unsustainable for a given community because those who do it professionally will simply go out of business. This is frequent in the case of small rural areas which grow most of their own food, creating intense competition at local markets (like farmers markets). This also means a loss of expertise in a given field of endeavor. Free exchange of goods or ideas is usually only successful in a system which is entirely based on said free exchange.
Thanks, Todd Parlo ·you have promptly indicated the importance of creating commercial value of non traditional fruit varieties being conserved. Heirloom and non commercial varieties can give better sale value with organized marketing and eco tourism can be associated for market support to the diversity at least for fruits like mango.
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