Nirosha Dilmini has been harvesting eggplants since the crack of dawn on her small plot of land in the village of Tanamalvila in southeastern Sri Lanka's Monaragala district. She's been putting her efforts into farming here for six years now. But never has she had such a lucrative year as 2023 in terms of produce and profits.
"The quarter acre of our land yielded produce equivalent to that of one acre," she says with pride as she takes a break, fanning herself under the shade of a tree and getting ready to pick the rest of the crop. She attributes this transformation to the Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) program implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) with funding from the United Nations Sri Lanka Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Fund.
Nirosha is one of 645 Sri Lankan farmers across three districts who were trained under the program and provided with equipment and technical packages to modernize their farming practices and increase their yields and profits.
The GAP program started as a response to the pressing food security challenges amidst Sri Lanka's economic crisis, supporting vegetable farmers to commercialize their products.
Nirosha and her fellow farmers each received an agriculture kit containing essential items such as a drip irrigation system, plastic mulch and insect-proof netting. The kit aims to reduce the cost of cultivation and help make more efficient use of crucial resources such as fertilizers, weed killers, pesticides and water.
Read more at fao.org