Kulsan Khatun, 48-yearold resident of Mahottari district Ward Number 6, welcomes visitors to her farm with sparkling smile. “I started farming vegetables like bottle gourd, pumpkin, sponge guard, cucumber, bitter guard, beans and okra by applying climate-friendly method. Among them, okra, cucumber, pumpkin, sponge guard, bottle gourd are ready to be sold and beans have just started flowering.” Her land has become a source of livelihood for her family of 15 members.

It now fulfills the vegetable needs of her family and has also become the main source of income. With some regret she continues explaining, “I was involved in farming for a long time but due to inadequate knowledge about adaptation farming, and appropriate seed quality, I always experience crop failure due to infection of unwanted insect and pest. After only small quantities of vegetables were produced, she felt discouraged.

But the support of Local Initiatives to Reduce Impacts of Climate Change (LIRIC) project implemented by ADRA and CDAFN and funded by European Union, motivated her to restart vegetable farming. The Climate Field School conducted by the project really helped her a lot. “The project staffs showed us practical demonstrations of various vegetable farming which is very useful for us and I followed that system of farming nowadays which benefits me a lot.” She further mentions, “Before, I started this, we had to buy vegetables worth Rs 500 every day to put three meals on the plate for our family and that too was not sufficient.”

But now the family is not worried about buying vegetables. Instead, they can eat as much vegetables as they want from their own land and sell the surplus. According to Kulsan, she saves around Rs 10,000 when she doesn’t have to buy vegetables. She also opened a bank account in her granddaughter’s name and has started saving Rs 3,000 a month so that she can use it in the future.