Ainun Pizar Seruni
The CIFOR/USAID Fellowship has been an awesome program. It led to the biggest change in my career. I am proud and grateful that I was part of the program and that I had the opportunity to study in the United States on a fully funded scholarship.
At the University of Missouri, I learned about a huge range of topics, including forest management, forest and biodiversity conservation, forest economics and land use, knowledge that can be applied in Indonesia. As well, under the supervision all of my advisors and collaborators, I improved my professional skills, which are so useful for career development. At first, experiencing a new method of learning in the United States was frightening, due to learning a complex subject in English-language.
Yet after experiencing a rollercoaster of ups and downs, I survived, completing my thesis research and graduating. In my career, I aspire in the next five to 10 years from now to be develop a broad set of skills that help me learn how to run my own social forestry research project. I aim to be part of a highly collaborative professional environment.
Agroforestry is a land management practice that has been heralded as practical and beneficial for smallholder farmers to support rural livelihoods, adapt to a changing climate, diversify revenue sources, and cope with risk. In this manuscript, we describe a parcelized land management system that does not meet traditional co-located agroforestry systems in the tropics. We introduce an alternative management practice that support farmers in minimizing feed cost per year and utilizing land that is under government jurisdiction. This system’s emphasis on the method of utilizing land as a source of fodder for livestock, cutting and carrying feed from the land to paddocks near the farmer’s house; these activities are done two to three times a day until the feed requirement is fulfilled. Primary data were collected through face-to-face interviews with the heads of households in the study area. A sample of 122 farmers who managed their farms following agroforestry practices was compared against 50 agriculture farmers with similar social and economic characteristic. The result shows that farmers who adopt agroforestry systems on their land and cut and carry system on their own and government land have more farming experience, have higher farm income, are located at higher elevation in the community, and are farther from the local market. When considering the household types of two different practices equally, on-farm incomes for agroforestry practice which includes cut and carry system families were higher by 13% compared to families that having agriculture practice which includes cut and carry system.
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