Hungry Farmers: A Contradiction?

If you received our annual report, you will have seen that we declared this year the Year of Youth Entrepreneurship and Agriculture (YEA 2025!).

Why has DML decided to focus on farmers in 2025? I’m glad you asked!

Farmers are the majority of those served through DML, even for those who are formally employed by the government, education, or business.  Many are subsistence farms, growing enough to feed a family for a portion of the year.  However, too many farmers cannot produce enough for their families.  Many have told me they do farming as a hobby, which keeps them busy (no food for lazy man, they say) because there is no profit.  They are lucky if they break even.  Often, they don’t.  So they get capital injections from family members now and then to get their seed and fertilizer; or they take a loan and have a tough time paying it back.

Hungry farmers.  It should be an oxymoron.  How can the food providers be hungry? Yet it is true. Smallholder farmers are often the hungriest people on earth.

According to the book, The Last Hunger Season, by Roger Thurow, the sharing of new farming advances was derailed before it reached farmers in rural areas of Africa, judging that those who had farms less than five acres in size were too poor and remote for attention. While US farmers are heavily supported by the government, producing vast stockpiles of food shipped as aid if needed, smallholder farmers in other parts of the world have lagged behind in terms of technologies, infrastructure, and financial incentives that are common elsewhere. The hybrid seeds that were available in the US as early as the 1930s are only now beginning to spread in the majority world.  Only 4% of African farmland is irrigated.  And one-third to one-half of its harvest is routinely wasted due to storage challenges (weevils and mold) and market issues.  In 2009, President Obama pledged to work alongside these farmers to "make your farms flourish and to let clean waters flow to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds." That effort has now ended but the need is still immense.

For almost twenty years, DML has been joined by subject matter experts to promote certain types of farming – pigs, chickens, goats, corn, cabbage, and more.  We’ve gone through trainings with Foundations for Farmers or Farming God’s Way but haven’t found a catalyst to impact our network. But last year, through a connection from the Global Alliance of Church Multiplication (of which DML is a member), we connected with an organization called Equipping Farmers International (EFI).  The root connection that we made is that they too want to work through the church.  They too have found the church to be where discipleship takes place, and farming is at the core of God’s heart! 

DML has access to many African denominations, which have access to thousands of farmers. EFI has information to help the farmers. We asked, "What if we placed agricultural trainers in denominations, who will have the core responsibility to teach and educate farmers so that people, productivity, profit, and the planet can flourish?" As the global population continues to rise, as trade wars start and stop, providing food internally for a nation is suitable for everyone.

By God's grace, and the partnership of many, we are starting this year. We are doing pilot projects in Sierra Leone, Burundi, India, and adjacent partnerships in Burkina Faso and Nigeria. Teams are being pulled together in each place to undergo EFI’s training. Then, we will get that training into the denominations and identify trainers who can carry this work out regionally. 

YEA 2025!  YEA God!  Please pray that the term "hungry farmer" will soon be more of an exception than the rule.