Innovation shared is resilience built: farmer to farmer knowledge sharing and adapting to climatic change.

• Main Author: Roessler, Hannah Maia
• Other Authors: Volpe, John
• Language: English; en
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: adaptive strategies; participatory video; farmer to farmer learning; resilience; climatic changes
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1828/4420

Does digitally-mediated farmer-to-farmer learning facilitate farm-level adaptation to climate change? Utilizing semi-structured interviews with small-scale organic farmers in the Cascadia Bioregion, I document how farmers perceive climate change and in what ways they are responding and/or adapting to these changes. Such small-scale farms have limited economic capacity to adapt to climate change. Access to innovative, low-cost but locally relevant solutions will require novel knowledge-dissemination mechanisms. A modern option is “participatory media” - a social network based approach, linking farmers to farmers through internet-exchange of photos and video. This project engages in a “bottom-up” approach to the development and sharing of knowledge. In collaboration with local farmers, I explored the efficacy of a participatory media method in moving towards improving farmers’ perception of and adaptation to climate change, as well as overall farm-level resilience. === Graduate