Ms Nabina BK, a 40 years old female farmer from Bheriganga Urban Municipality-11, Surkhet, lives in a joint family with three household members. The major occupation of the household is agriculture which comprises of cereals crop production, livestock rearing, vegetable farming, and mushroom cultivation.
Ms BK was a community partner of Caritas Nepal implemented SAFBIN I project ( March 2011 to February 2016) where she received many capacity building trainings on different seasonal and off seasonal vegetable production.
During the first phase of SAFBIN, she had undertaken an on-farm action research in her vegetable garden with different mulching practices in bitter gourd vegetable. She found that mulching with rice straw was not only very effective to conserve the soil moisture but also produced healthier vegetables than with no mulch. Since then she has been practicing mulching in different vegetables with locally available mulching materials such as rice straw, residue of maize stem and leaves. This has helped her to grow more vegetables from her homestead garden. This had also increased the consumption of more vegetables. Her family now consumes fresh vegetables for more than 8 month of a year and which was only 3-4 months per year before the project intervention.
Now, with the new phase of SAFBIN, she is with other members of the smallholder farmer collective very much excited to grow more vegetables commercially and collectively. For this the group has also established a collective nursery where they are raising the seedling of different nutritious vegetables. Her plan is to grow more vegetables with different mulching materials. She has also received support from the program to build a new cow shed from where she can collect the cow urine more systematically to prepare the botanical pesticides with locally available botanicals mixed with cow urine.
Currently she is also being a role model in the village with this new practice and she is not only committed to upscale the vegetable production in larger area but also to teach the farmers outside from her SHFC group.
