Posted March 09, 2017 16:16:34

A central Victorian organic farmer has teamed up with a Samoan counterpart in sharing farming techniques and to learn from each other's experiences.

Norma Tauiliili, who is touring Australia on a three month Rotary-funded visit, said farming in the Pacific nation was a slow, laboured process often troubled by a lack of resources.

"We don't have that much equipment, like machinery, we all use our hands to do our work. That's the problem," Ms Tauiliili said.

"Even with seeds we don't have that much, we have to buy them from the agricultural store and give them out to our farmers."

Ms Tauiliili is from Apia in Samoa where she works as a senior field officer for Women in Business Development Inc (WIBDI), an NGO that works in 183 Samoan villages which nurtures certified organic agricultural enterprises.

Her first stop was a certified organic orchard in Harcourt, central Victoria, run by third generation orchardist and 2015 Victorian Rural Woman of the Year, Katie Finlay.

"We're a tiny farm here in Australia but we're fully mechanised. We have forklifts and tractors and every bit of equipment we could want," Ms Finlay said.

"Having Norma come here, through her eyes, we're a big fancy farm that's got all the equipment they just dream of having."

Ms Finley said that many Samoan farmers just wanted access to tools.

"They want hoes and rakes and seeds. It's that very basic form of infrastructure that we take for granted," she said.

Ms Finley said it had been a "real eye opener" understanding the practical considerations of bringing market opportunities to farmers with so few resources.

It was not just a lack of mechanised equipment that made farming more challenging in the small Polynesian country.

Many Samoan farmers do not have vehicles, making it difficult to transport goods to the local market.

That is where WIBDI step in.

"[We] pick [the farmers] up and help them out with transportation, and after the night market we deliver them back home," Ms Tauiliili said.

The support offered by WIBDI also extends to funding a youth program tackling truancy and unemployment.

"We reach out to those villages that have youth that don't go to school and don't have jobs," Ms Tauiliili said.

"[It involves] learning and giving them knowledge and skills for organic farming and how to take care of their environment because nowadays climate change is a really big issue for our country."

While Samoa lacks resources, Ms Finley said its people have a different, more prosperous relationship to their land than in Australia.

In Samoa, most families own land and additional family members also have access.

"If it's family land then each of the [family members] have a right to the land. They can build houses on the land," Ms Tauiliili said.

"Some of them will divide the land and some will share it."

Ms Finley said one of the barriers for young farmers in Australia was this access to land.

"It changes your perspective of what is wealth and who has access to what," Ms Finley said.

"Farmers in Samoa don't have access to seeds and tools, but they've got as much land and water as they could possibly want so they have a lot of inherent wealth available to them.

"One of the gifts that we can give our young farmers here in Australia is helping them get access to farming land.

Topics: human-interest, women-in-agriculture, women, sustainable-and-alternative-farming, community-and-society, feminism, work, harcourt-3453, pacific, samoa

Excerpt from:

Sharing organic food-growing knowledge across the Pacific - ABC Online