Through the Improving Smallholder Coffee Farming Systems in Southeast Asia ( Coffee+) project, GIZ, the Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives’ Department of Agricultural Extension and the Department of Agriculture have worked together to design the curriculum and knowledge toolkit with the aim of increasing entrepreneurship and farmers’ abilities to manage their farms as a small business.

The curriculum has also been adjusted based on actual training with farmers and integrated in the Thai agricultural authorities’ capacity building system and continue enhancing farmers’ business capacities.

The video animation series are specifically designed to enable not only agricultural officials but also coffee smallholders farmers in southern Thailand to ‘learn by doing’. So they could optimise production costs and improve their incomes by utilising tools for example agriculture calendar, farming management, and income and expenses account, following the Agri-preneurship and Good Agricultural Practice (GAP) concepts.

“In fact, COVID-19  has given opportunities to everyone including coffee smallholders farmers to always adapt  and utilise digital technology and social media which have become key to new knowledge management and learning tools for us and coffee smallholders farmers to learn and aware of different farming systems. These tools will enable both agricultural staff and coffee farmers themselves to effectively deal with unexpected circumstances caused by climate change,” said Pouchamarn Wongsanga, Director of the Coffee+ project in Thailand.

Produced in audience-friendly animation formats, the FBS online course is divided into 12 chapters as follows:

Chapter 1 » “Is farming a business”
Chapter 2 » “Know the units to know your assets”
Chapter 3 » “Manage your farm for enough and good quality food”
Chapter 4 » “Money-Out, Money-In: Know whether you are doing a good business”
Chapter 5 » “Decisions for doing a good business”
Chapter 6 » “Seize opportunities to diversify your farm enterprises for more income”
Chapter 7 » “Manage your money throughout the year”
Chapter 8 » “How to get good financial services”
Chapter 9 » “Earning more money from growing good quality coffee”
Chapter 10 » “Benefits from being a member of the coffee farmer group”
Chapter 11 » “Earning more profits by improving productivity and optimised production costs”
Chapter 12 » “Becoming an agri-preneur”

“Apart from the series of knowledge management videos, the electronic handbook is also available on the cluster website for free download. So the young generation of coffee smallholders can easily access useful resources and learn about coffee farming and production systems and management. Agricultural officials themselves can also utilise these tools for passing on knowledge to the coffee smallholders farmers in the field,” Mrs. Pouchamarn said.