World Food Day - A Harvest of Good Food

Milton struggled to provide for his family in Zambia because of a severe drought. But that changed when he was chosen by THRIVE to be trained in a conservation farming method called Farming God’s Way.

After the training, Milton and his family planted a large garden that soon sprouted huge, flowering tomato plants. Beans are growing between the tomato plants and there are rows and rows of collard greens.

Every day after school, Milton’s daughter Joyce comes straight to the garden to help with watering. “I like to stay here at the garden. I water and I help to keep animals out of the plants,” she says. She likes the collard greens best, but when there are ripe tomatoes, she loves to pick and eat them right there in the garden. “It’s nice to have this good food. Others don’t have such good things to eat,” she says.

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World Vision's THRIVE (Transforming Household Resilience in Vulnerable Environments) Program was created to build improved and resilient livelihoods for smallholder farmers. Milton's story illustrates the critical issue of managing the on-farm and off-farm natural resources that make the farm and its surroundings a resilient and sustainable ecosystem.

THRIVE originally began to scale up in response to the 2011 Horn of Africa famine and then the 2012 Sahel Food Emergency Crisis. Today's big food emergency crisis is back in the Horn of Africa, as a 3rd year of La Nina has pushed rainfall into the Indian Ocean. Milton is getting lots of rain, while other farmers in the Horn of Africa are seeing another punishing season of failed rains.

What THRIVE is showing is that - with 2/3 people living in extreme poverty being smallholder farmers - if we want to solve extreme poverty, the path runs through the smallholder farm. That means looking holistically at the issues, including at the productivity, sustainability, and resilience of the farm with its soil, its water, its vegetation, and its fertility.