Smallholder Vegetable Cultivation: Challenges in Sustaining Commercial Production and Market Links

This poster reports on how smallholder farmers can establish commercially oriented systems and maintain market links. Smallholder vegetable producers in Nanggung sub-district face some major uncertainties which impose difficult planning horizons. Product prices often vary day to day, seasonally and year to year; yields vary from season to season; planting and harvesting times may vary considerably due to inconsistent weather patterns. Price uncertainty is a result of the biological lag time between planning, production, harvestand sale. In many cases, vegetables are ready to harvest but the crop does not meet market specifications or insects and disease cause significant damage and loss of marketability. The World Agroforestry Centre and Winrock International conducted action research in Nanggungsub-district, Bogor district, West Java, to reach motivated and innovative farmers who were committed to improving their incomes by increasing the production and market access of their agroforestry products, specifically commodities produced in vegetable agroforestry systems (VAFs). Activities were conducted as part of the Agroforestry and Sustainable Vegetable Production in Southeast Asian Watershedsproject supported by the USAID-funded Sustainable Agriculture and Natural Resource Management Collaborative Research Support Program (SANREM-CRSP.)