About the project
Rice fields stretch across Indonesia, sustaining livelihoods, feeding families, and shaping rural life. Yet behind the green paddies, many smallholder farmers face two urgent, intertwined challenges: unsafe pesticide practices and hidden micronutrient deficiencies in their communities.

In response, HarvestPlus Solutions and Croplife Indonesia launched a two-year project in North Sumatra Province to empower 2,500 farmers and 1,000 women with the knowledge, tools, and networks needed for sustainable, safe, and nutrition-smart rice cultivation.

This project brings together four essential elements of change:

• Good Agricultural Practices (GAP): improving climate‐smart land and crop management, responsible input use, crop rotation and healthy soils
• Integrated Pest Management (IPM) & pesticide stewardship: reducing chemical risk by promoting safer, smarter pest control
• Nutrition‐Smart Agriculture (NSA): promoting zinc‐biofortified rice and nutrition behaviour change, with a special focus on women and families
• Farmer Group Strengthening: building strong, resilient farmer groups that can decide together, market together, and act together

At the center of this project are Farmer Field Schools, which anchor hands‐on sessions where farmers plant, monitor, discuss and evaluate. Through this ‘learn by doing’ approach, knowledge becomes practice.

What We Expect to Unfold
By the end of this 2 year initiative, we anticipate four key changes:

• Widespread adoption of safe pesticide practices, IPM and GAP by smallholder farmers.
• Increased production and consumption of zinc-biofortified rice and healthier diets among women and children.
• Farmer groups that make decisions, negotiate markets and withstand shocks.
• An extension workforce and digital-learning system ready to scale the model nationally.
  

When farmers cultivate in harmony with nature, when communities grow crops that nourish as well as sustain, when women are equipped with nutrition knowledge–then the impact ripples out to incomes, to health, to environment, and to future generations. This initiative paves a pathway from unsafe pesticide use and hidden nutrient-gaps to safe, smart farming and better nourished communities across Indonesia.