The Farmversities Alliance

What would education look like if it were shaped by soil, seeds, and local farmers?

www.farmversities.org

Our Invitation...

The Farmversities Alliance aims to regenerate and revalue organic and natural farming models, local economies, indigenous knowledge systems, and ancient wisdom traditions. This starts with restoring the dignity of farmers and the farming profession..

Modern agricultural universities are feeding us into the extractivist and toxic global economy at the expense of local communities and local ecosystems. The future of farming is far too important to be left in the hands of agricultural universities and global corporations.

In the face of climate emergency, it is crucial to re-build our sustainable food systems around the country. We invite you to join us in decolonizing industrial agricultural frameworks and in re-constructing a new foundation for contextualized knowledge production and sharing in partnership with local communities. 

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Farmversities believe that the land and the farmers are the real gurus.

What do Farmversities do?

OFFER LEARNING PROGRAMMES:

A Farmversity has learning and capacity building programmes on different themes such as (not limited to): soil, water, forest, agroecology, seed saving, composting, food processing and value addition, farm tools and equipment, action research, labor management, marketing, farm entrepreneurship, community building, digital technologies, decoding the global economy and decolonizing our mindsets. Courses are validated by Farmversities Network and Ecoversities Alliance.

BUILD LOCAL MARKETS AND POLICIES:

Farmversities focus on rebuilding local community markets, alternative currencies, reducing the distance of food miles and strengthening trust-bonds between farmers and communities. We support efforts of marketing, investment, branding and social media. As a network, we seek to re-define the system of economic profit, money andunlimited economic growth with a vision of building a thriving local economy and regenerating local commons of real wealth. They also have developed local policy frameworks for supporting a regenerative food ecology. Local policies include regulations, subsidies, taxes, insurance, loans and resource mobilization.

CONDUCT LOCAL ACTION RESEARCH:

Farmversities are envisioned to be spaces of local active action research. Each Farmversity will specify specific areas of action research which they are engaged in they local context. They will be supported to make films and podcasts and publish papers related totheir research. They will also be encouraged to redefine what ‘research’ means. We will work towards regenerating open source local knowledge repository rather than private patents. This enables us to reshape and rebuild the creative commons where we share openly with each other, challenging the corporate way of copyrighting and patenting knowledge systems.

WEAVE COMMUNITY ECOSYSTEM:

Farmversities explore various community-building processes and the regeneration of social wealth and relationships through practices like community festivals, pop-up cafes, community arts, gift culture and spiritual farming. They work on healing and re-weaving the local rural and urban social fabric of young people, farmers, politicians, doctors, healers, spiritual leaders, chefs, sustainability practitioners, local government officials, etc. to build vibrant, dynamic local governance and leadership models at the panchayat, tehsil, district levels.

Visit www.farmversity.org for more details