In Cambodia, Project Alba helps farmers increase income, protect against seed raiders

In parts of rural Cambodia, farmers’ primary source of income comes from harvesting rice — once a year. This is a poor outcome compared to other ASEAN countries which harvest twice or thrice annually.

To help increase farmers’ income, Victor Combal-Weiss and Guillaume Virag founded Project Alba. Project Alba’s socially-minded, sustainable business model works by lowering the risk for farmers to start a second cropping. Farmers get their farm inputs like seeds, fertilizers, and technical knowhow from Project Alba along with a guaranteed buying price for their produce.

In Cambodia, Project Alba has already developed a market for lettuce — an entirely new crop that wasn’t previously produced in Cambodia. It turned out there was a ready market for the vegetable in the increasing number of high end hotels that were sprouting in Cambodia.

So they started a pilot program that recruited a number of lettuce farmers in rural Cambodia. These farmers would plant lettuce to supplement their once-a-year income from rice harvesting. Farmers can earn as much as 250% more when they harvest the lettuce and sell them back to Project Alba.

On paper, this was a win-win business model. The lettuce revenue supplements farmers’ regular once-yearly rice harvesting income and Project Alba makes a profit by selling it to high end hotels in Cambodia that were currently importing lettuce.

The raiders arrive

However, during the pilot program, farmers discovered that while they were dutifully planting the lettuce, a majority of their seeds weren’t sprouting at all. Seeds just went missing. Someone or something was taking the seeds away.

One of these pilot farmers, Hem Yeun (picture right) grew so desperate that she decided to take matters into her own hands.

She resolved to monitor her seed plot to see what was really happening to her lettuce seeds.

She guarded the seed plot the whole day and finally — around the middle of the night and armed with a flashlight — she noticed a trail of ants snaking away from her plot.

Suspecting that the ants were the sneaky culprits that were stealing her seeds, she followed the trail back to the ant’s nest and took it upon herself to dig it up and found the lettuce seeds stored there.

She learned that night that Cambodian ants love lettuce seeds. These ants weren’t eating them right away, but taking them back to their nest. She recovered the seeds and shared her findings with Project Alba.