 The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Rural Development in collaboration with World University Service of Canada have engaged local farmers in a series of training workshops on the role of vegetable grafting in climate smart agriculture strategies. According to crop protection officer Johnny Smith, this intervention will facilitate a more reliable and consistent supply of produce to the market. So the current grafting training covers a theoretical session and it covers a practical session. So we have the morning, we normally start at nine and we run on till one. We start with lectures on the work that has been done locally on grafting vegetables. So we've looked at grafting tomatoes on various rootstocks, we've grafted sweet peppers on different rootstocks and we've looked at how they perform against biotic stresses and abiotic stresses. So we're going to now present that information that research to the farmers so that they could see the possibilities that they could gain from actually practicing vegetable grafting. Vegetable grafting helps in reducing losses and the amount of money spent in managing disease problems. It gives the farmer a better chance at being successful in their enterprise and in overall production, it also promotes less pesticide use. What IPM tries to do is to discourage the immediate, normally farmers run to chemicals immediately, first stop. So we try to put chemicals as the last option. So vegetable grafting now will be one of your first options. So if you have a problem, a biotic problem, a bacteria or fungus in your soil, you can use this technique to protect your crop. Okay, so if you're not using the technique, normally the crop would you'd lost maybe 50% of your actual plants. So that means your yield would be decreased and that directly affects food security because you have less coming from your farm. The farmer also has to spend more in terms of management. So he has more pesticide to buy, he has to pay workers to apply that pesticide and you have more and then even after you've done that sometimes you're not successful in managing that disease. So it costs more and the farmer is experiencing losses. The crop protection officer has indicated that the response from participating farmers have been very encouraging and they have recommended varieties of vegetables that can be used for grafting. Just as impressive, farmers have already been applying the principles that have been taught. From the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Rural Development, I'm Ryan O'Brien.