USAID supports boosting dietary diversity and income through homestead gardening in rural Bangladesh

Feroza Begum (38), the wife of a landless farmer Zafar Molla, lives in Kafura, a small village in Bangladesh’s Faridpur district. Her family of five includes herself, her husband, son, daughter, and an abandoned grandson. Because her husband is sick, her family earns income by selling food to their neighbors that they grow on the land they lease next to their house.
Feroza and Zafar’s family has only five decimal of homestead land in Kafura village, Gerda Union, Faridpur Sadar Upazila, Faridpur District. Feroza’s husband, Zafar Molla, has epilepsy and cannot do many things since he needs care continuously. They have two sons and one daughter. Elder son Faisal Molla divorced his wife, married again, and lived with his second wife. Faisal’s abandoned son, Abdullah Molla (18 months) – Feroza’s grandson lives with her family.
It was not very easy to run her family in this complex situation with a limited earning source. Then, Konika Seed Company, supported by the USAID’s Feed the Future Bangladesh Nutrition Activity project, established a demonstration plot of vegetables on Feroza’s leased land in February 2021.
Homestead farms are an excellent potential source of nutritious food for rural households. However, limited knowledge of agricultural practices and the use of sub-standard inputs limit the quality and quantity to yield rural households receive from their homestead farms. The Activity collaborates with companies like Konika Seed Co. to promote quality agricultural inputs and good farming practices to rural homestead farmers through a grant award.
Since early 2021, Konika has been conducting field demonstrations, community meetings, and agricultural advisory sessions in the Faridpur district to sensitize rural households on quality inputs and good farming practices, like seedbed preparation and proper seed application vermicompost fertilizer, and fencing. Such engagements are also helping Konika to promote and sell its mini packets of vegetable seeds, Trichoderma (a type of bio-fertilizer), and biopesticides. Most of their recent sales are directed to homestead production, indicating that households have started to use quality inputs.
As the intervention continues, more rural households are interested in adopting the best practices, increasing homestead yield, and consuming nutritious foods in rural households. So far, Konika established 256 demonstration plots and provided more than 10,000 crop advisory prescriptions that sensitized about 30,000 rural people in the Faridpur district on consuming diversified food and increasing income by selling the vegetables from their homestead gardens.
Since then, Feroza has cultivated four types of leafy vegetables — red amaranth, amaranth, Indian spinach, and Kangkon (Kolmi) — and sown some pit crops, e.g., bottle gourd, bitter gourd, cucumber, and sweet gourd. The community meetings increased the knowledge of the nutritional benefits of various vegetables of many rural families like Feroza and Zafar.
“I have learned many things about proper vegetable gardening through the demonstration program of Konika Seed company; it helped me ensuring nutrition of my family, especially my grandchild Abdullah,” Feroza said.
Now her family members are consuming diversified food from their home garden, which has significantly improved the nutritional status of her family. Feroza was also selling some leafy vegetables and invested that money to expand their food vendor business. She plans to ensure it offers nutritious food to encourage neighbors to eat more healthily.
Feroza informed, “Since February 2021, I harvested vegetables five times, consumed them, and sold the surplus after distributing them to some of my neighbors. I have earned more than Taka 5,000/-, which is a great support to run my family with a disabled husband.”
Feroza, once who faced a massive financial crisis, now managed to buy and run a food shop for her husband with the additional money from selling the vegetables. It has eventually changed the lifestyle of the entire family. The family is operating a small grocery shop beside her house. Most of the time, Feroza supports taking care of the small business with her husband and son. The monthly income from the shop is around Taka 8,000/- that helps to maintain families.
“I am very grateful to Konika Seed Company as well as the Bangladesh Nutrition activity project for supporting me to overcome my family difficulties. Now I know how to prepare a homestead garden; I will continue it as long as possible.” Feroza added, mentioning how her family’s life changed since learning about sustainable agriculture and nutrition.
The monitoring data of Bangladesh Nutrition Activity says that the consumption of diversified diets of female participants increased from 81.1% to 88.3% recently. The impact study report of the Activity showed that 100% of demonstration farmers responded to the community people learned from the demonstrations and replicated.