I just returned from six weeks of intense and productive community-based field research with local partners in northern Nicaragua. After training in research ethics and methods, our team of 11 rural Nicaraguan farmers, organic agriculture inspectors, and cooperative development promoters worked with the Santa Clara University faculty and collaborating institutions to complete more than 350 household surveys. Many thanks to colleagues at ASDENIC, PRODECOOP, and the Campesino-a-Campesino for their feedback and support in this effort. We also conducted focus groups, as well as community mapping activities documenting land tenure, water resources, common property, and land use change.
During this time, four collaborators from Santa Clara University (Bill Sundstrom, Iris Stewart-Frey, Ed Maurer, and Lisa Kelley) joined us for 10 days of field research, and two undergraduate students also participated.
You can read more about our collaborations across Santa Clara University here. Also see an update from the new postdoctoral fellow, and recent UC Berkeley graduate, Lisa Kelley that recently joined the team, and blogged her experience: https://blogs.scu.edu/foodwater/2017/07/21/lisa-kelleys-blog-post-2017/
It’s now time to analyze the data, write, and plan next steps.