When Janet Maro started building training programs with farmers in Tanzania, she didn’t arrive with a curriculum. She asked farmers what they knew, what they needed, and what they could bring to the table — and built from there. That instinct, to treat farmers as the architects rather than the audience, turns out to explain most of what makes Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania (SAT) unusual: why groups keep meeting and planning years after projects end, why an organic shop opened in Morogoro in 2012 has since seeded eight more across the country, and why a conflict between Maasai pastoralists and smallholder farmers that had turned violent was resolved not through outside intervention but through a simple exchange of manure and crop residues, negotiated by the communities themselves.

This episode is part of The African Regenerative Frontrunners series is supported by Rootical and co-hosted by The Organic Guy. 

WHY SMALL-SCALE FARMERS DON’T HAVE TO BE BENEFICIARIES

SAT has trained thousands of farmers, influenced national policy, and built a network that reaches hundreds of thousands of people across Tanzania — starting with Janet on foot, going to farmers, not the other way around. Sixteen years in, the original farmer groups are still active, new farmers are showing up wanting to join, and cooperatives have formed that nobody planned for. None of that happened because of a well-funded programme. It happened because the knowledge farmers brought to the table was treated as the raw material, not an afterthought.

“We asked them what their needs were, but not just what their needs were, but what do they bring in to the table? And you cannot imagine the vast experience and knowledge that the farmers really brought to the table. And we really built up on that.” — Janet Maro

HOW A CONFLICT BETWEEN FARMERS AND MAASAI PASTORALISTS WAS RESOLVED WITH MANURE AND CROP RESIDUES

In 2016, during a long drought, the area around SAT’s training centre in Morogoro was experiencing violent conflict between farming communities and Maasai pastoralists — loss of life, loss of cattle, loss of property. SAT invited Maasai elders and farmers to the training centre. When Maasai participants arrived and saw farmers in the room, they told Janet: we don’t talk to these people. Using participatory approaches, she ran separate sessions first, then brought the groups together. By the end of the day, people who had refused to be in the same room, were shaking hands.

The project — supported by Biovision Foundation — formalised into an exchange of farmyard manure for crop residues and agreed grazing access. The district adopted it as a district-level initiative, and in 2023 the President of Tanzania awarded SAT for its contributions to conflict reduction.

“By the time the meeting was finished, I saw the people who were not talking to each other bidding each other farewell and shaking hands. And I thought, wow, there is hope.” — Janet Maro

WHAT KEEPS SAT MOVING WHEN THE FUNDING DOESN’T

There is still no reliable long-term financing for agroecological work in Tanzania. Janet names it plainly as the single biggest structural barrier to scaling. No policy framework existed when SAT started in 2010. The dominant narrative that agroecology cannot feed a growing population is still loud. And yet SAT has kept going, crawling when it couldn’t walk, walking when it couldn’t run. The training materials are shared freely under Creative Commons. The farmer knowledge is shared openly. The organic shop slogan from 2012 — healthy organic food for Tanzanians — is still the point.

“Whether we are rolling or crawling or walking or running, the most important thing is that we keep moving. And that’s all that matters.” — Janet Maro

Brian and Janet also talked about:

• Growing up in the Chaga home gardens on Mount Kilimanjaro
• The bare slopes of the Uluguru Mountains and what they told her about food security
• Opening the SAT organic shop in Morogoro in 2012 and the eight shops it has since inspired
• Why SAT never engages in terminology wars between organic, agroecology, and regenerative agriculture
• Why you will never find a monocrop field anywhere SAT works
• Tanzania’s National Ecological Organic Agriculture Strategy (2023) and the gap between policy and implementation
• Advice for young African women founders: start small and share knowledge freely
• A 20–30 year vision for soil health and food systems across Africa

MORE INTERVIEWS IN THIS SERIES:

• Omoke Brian – Inside Africa’s regenerative agriculture opportunity
• Million Belay – Why the USAID shutdown was a gift to agroecology in Africa
• Ivan Mandela – Unicorns can wait, African farmers can’t
• Olusola Sowemimo – How a Nigerian lawyer built a profitable organic farm with standards, data and community
• Emmanuel Luwemba – The decentralised business disrupting the seed monopolies in East Africa
• Kofi Boa — You can see soil health in a single season

More about our guest:
Janet Maro is the founder of Sustainable Agriculture Tanzania (SAT), an agroecology organisation she established in Morogoro in 2010. Over the past 16 years she has built a farmer network reaching hundreds of thousands of people across Tanzania, opened the country’s first dedicated organic shop, and helped develop Tanzania’s National Ecological Organic Agriculture Strategy in 2023. That same year she received a presidential award for SAT’s work reducing violent conflict between farmers and Maasai pastoralists.

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