Tag Archives: agroecology

Ecuador: Into the Banana Republic

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For whatever reason, my 2-year-old associates the word “errand” with bananas. I say, “I’ve got to run some errands,” and she says, “You get more bo-mannas? You come back more bo-mannas?”

Okay, so it might have something to do with our family of three eating about a banana and a half every day.

I’d never given much thought to how bananas are grown. They don’t make the Clean 15 list as being lowest in pesticides, but they’re also not on the Dirty Dozen. With such a thick skin, it seemed like paying the premium for organic bananas was an option I’d take when I won the lottery.

Until I went to Ecuador, one of the world’s top 10 banana producers for export. While I didn’t have the chance to tour a “conventional” banana plantation, we drove by mile after mile of mono-cropped banana fields, some protected by electric fences.

A huge contrast to these flat expanses of banana trees was the hilly agroecological farm of Wilson Sanchez. Sanchez is a participant in a new Heifer project called Strengthening the Productive Diversity of Agro-Forestry Small Holders in El Oro, Azuay and Guayas Project. Witnessing the hard work and dedication required to grow bananas for export, learning about the negative environmental impacts of conventional bananas and the alternative provided by agroecology, and scratching the surface of the Fair Trade banana movement, gave me a new outlook on bananas.

Over the next several days, I’ll share some photos and videos I captured of Wilson Sanchez and others involved in this small community of agroecological banana producers. Hopefully, by the end of it, you will be as convinced as I am that Fair Trade, organic bananas are worth the premium. This is definitely one of those cases where “voting with your dollar” means something real.

Growing For Market

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After we visited the agroecology market in Loja, Ecuador, we went to visit the farm of one of the vendors participating in the project. Maria and Rafael Paccha had a very diverse peri-urban farm with vegetables, fruit trees and an entire greenhouse of strawberries.
Maria Paccha in her vegetable plot.
Part of Heifer’s work with the Paccha family and others has been to help local organizations, like the Agroecological Network, establish and maintain farmers markets such as the one in Loja. In the past, the practice was largely for farmers to sell their produce to an intermediary (this was a common theme throughout our entire visit in Ecuador). Doing so, however, gives the farmers a much lower profit margin than what they can earn by selling directly to consumers in the market.

Another piece of the work is connecting these agroecological producers with the fishing communities to allow for the cross-selling of goods, thereby diversifying the diets of both groups.

Using inter-cropping and drip-tape irrigation helps make the most of the small farm’s land.
Strawberry greenhouse.
There seems to be a common belief that you can’t grow
 good strawberries without chemicals.
This basket would like to argue otherwise.
Rafael Paccha


It was interesting talking with the farmers, asking them what they needed to succeed. Out of this group, the most common answer was more land. More land so they could grow, sell and earn more. The Paccha family raises their produce on about .15 acres. What they’d like is to have six acres or so, which would not only allow them to raise more produce for the market, but also to have a cow and other small livestock. Another serious need is more water for irrigation. A significant hurdle to owning more land and building a higher capacity irrigation system is access to credit through traditional banks. Currently, financial institutions in this area do not recognize a diversified family farm as an investment opportunity. Were the Paccha family raising a mono-crop of corn or wheat, for example, they would be more likely to secure a loan to purchase additional land. The irony here is that an agroecological farm is much less vulnerable to external risks than a monoculture farm (pests, disease, etc).

A Visit to an Agroecological Fair in Loja, Ecuador

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When traveling abroad, I’ve lately found I prefer not to do too much research into where I’m headed. I like going in with as open a mind as possible, with few expectations. Something that has struck me on this visit to South America is how similar certain things are, not just with the United States, but with my specific home, Little Rock, Arkansas. This past Sunday, my colleagues and I flew from Quito to Loja, Ecuador. Our first stop was a farmer’s market, where we visited with Heifer participants and sampled their goods for breakfast.

Heifer participants wear green aprons and sell under green tents,
 distinguishing themselves from the sellers up the hill,
who sell produce that’s “conventionally” grown and not always local.

The market is divided into two sections. The first is the agroecological market, which is where Heifer Ecuador participants have booths. (The term “agroecology” has it’s own definition, but for the most part, consider it about the same as “organic.”) All of the products sold under the green tents are grown without chemicals and using practices that care for the environment.

Oscar Casteneda sampling some milk bread.

The second section of the market, however, is where “conventional” products are sold. This reminded me of our main farmer’s market in Little Rock. Some of the products may be local, but many are imported, out of season, and likely have been treated with any number of agri-chemicals.

My breakfast of milk bread and colada de sambo
(a warm beverage of milk, brown sugar and the pulp of some sort of gourd).

Our farmers who sell here come from near and far. Some grow in urban or peri-urban gardens, while others must pay for a truck to bring their produce in from their rural farms. We visited farms in both situations, and I’ll be sharing those soon.

Eggs, cheese and produce.

We had the chance to ask some of the customers of the agroecological market why they shop there. Some say price (unlike in the United States, prices for agroecological produce in this market are less than that of the conventional produce up the hill), but many more recognize the health and environmental benefits of organic produce.

Pierre Ferrari finds Heifer’s logo.
More produce! A head of lettuce costs $0.50 (wish I could bring some back).
Heifer Ecuador staff member Diana Guayllas holds up a jicama.
Granadilla, relative of the passion fruit.
That’s not punch in the cup; it’s called horchata tea,
and it’s made with the ingredients you see right there on the table. 

This has nothing to do with Heifer,
 but I shot this out the van window on our way to the market,
and I just had to share.

Ecuador: Diverse and Dynamic

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Before digging into the Ecuador leg of our South American trip, I thought it might be helpful to describe the situation here, which is complex, to say the least.

Ecuador is fantastically biodiverse. I’ve never seen so many different plants in my life. It is also culturally and geographically diverse–there are 13 different indigenous nationalities living in the Andean highlands, the Amazon, the coastal areas and the Galapagos Islands. Migration out of rural areas has left the cities of Quito (the capital) and Guayaquil crowded. Poverty is everywhere, but highly concentrated in rural areas. In the rural highlands, 78 percent of the population lives in poverty; on the rural coast, the poverty rate is as high as 86 percent. A whopping 40 percent of rural indigenous people are malnourished.

To the logical mind, this doesn’t seem to make sense. Why, in a place so rich in biodiversity with thousands of years of ancestral agricultural knowledge, are so many people poor and hungry?

Here is just a sample of the contributing factors:

  • Land and water distribution are inequitable. Large agribusinesses growing cash crops for export, like bananas, coffee, cocoa, rice and potatoes are on the best, easiest to farm land and use the vast majority of the water available for agriculture.
  • At the same time, the major food crops consumed by Ecuadorians in-country are largely grown on farms 50 acres or smaller. Agriculture policies, however, are primarily focused on export growth.
  • Access to things like irrigation and credit for small farmers is dismally low, so it is difficult for small farmers to get ahead.
  • Predatory extraction of natural resources (petroleum, shrimp, metals).
So what’s the solution? Heifer’s view, which is in line with the findings of the United Nations Special Rapporteur’s Report on Agroecology and the Right to Food, is that agroecology applied by rural communities working together will end hunger and poverty here in Ecuador while caring for the Earth.

Allin Kausay

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Good Living. That’s what Allin Kausay means. It’s the name of a Heifer Peru project in the Cusco region of Peru. This project, which is only about five months in, plans to contribute to improved food systems and living conditions for 1,540 families. Heifer does this by helping them plan the management of their resources, implement agroecology, link to local markets, and involve them in processes that impact local and regional policies for rural families.

Friday morning we visited Dolores Delgado on her farm in the Huachanccay community about an hour from Cusco. Dolores’ farm is small, but very well organized and well-kept. In just the short five-month life of the project’s activities, the practical benefits of agroecological production are clear. In the next four or five years, Dolores intends to be a certified agroecological producer. She is already one of the biggest sellers of guinea pigs in the areal. Right now, she gets about $8 per guinea pig. Once she’s certified, she’ll get nearly $15 per. To earn even higher an income, Dolores will be able to sell an organic breeding male guinea pig for $36 each.

Have a look at her farm:

Heifer Peru and Headquarters staff arrive at Dolores’ farm.

Common on Heifer participants’ farms are project-related murals,
painted with colored clays. A plastered building for guinea pigs is a big deal here.

Cuy Breeding “Happy Little Farm”
A sign welcomes us into Delores’ guinea pig room.

We must step in ash before entering the guinea pig house so we don’t bring in contaminants.

Wire on the ceiling helps keep rats and weasels away from the guinea pigs.

Dolores shows us her guinea pig cages, which her son helped her build.
There are metal pans under all of the cages to allow for the collection of manure.

The pipes in the back allow Dolores to capture urine, which is high in nitrogen.

Dolores shows us a breakdown of her guinea pig production in terms of inputs, costs and profits.

Dolores shows us the nutritional breakdown of guinea pigs, which are highly nutritious.

Dolores grows fodder for her guinea pigs. She has a basket of ryegrass and barley.

Dolores also makes regular feed for her animals.

In addition to saving money by growing and processing fodder and food for her guinea pigs,
Dolores also cuts costs by making her own medecine. She keeps her animals very healthy,
so they don’t often require medecine at all. What she’s holding is a salve for grass cuts they sometimes get.

Pierre Ferrari gets to hold a guinea pig.

Dolores is so proud of her farm and pleased to show it off to us.

Dolores practices worm composting with guinea pig manure.

Once the compost is ready, Dolores ferments it with water in a drum.
The jug is full of what we would call “compost tea.”

Dolores’ husband uses a basic sprayer to distribute the compost tea.

Using organic fertilizer is already paying off. These are fodder crops for the guinea pigs.

They’ve also used the fertilizer on their family vegetable garden with great success.

And what would a Peruvian farm (or street, for that matter) be without a sleeping dog?

The Business of Preserving the Savanna

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Heifer project participants plant cashew seedlings
Photos, video and story by Bill Fitzgerald
 
The business of burning wood to produce charcoal has been linked to support of Al Shabbab in the Horn of Africa. While Heifer is not addressing terrorism in Sierra Leone, we are addressing desertification and soil depletion.

The vast swaths of savanna outside Freetown are subject to annual burning during “the dries” of March and April. A single spark or careless match and a fire erupts that lasts for days and threatens villages like Robombeh. There, the Sabenti Women’s Farmers Association is working to establish cashew plantations that will provide long-term income and make the savanna less susceptible to fire, since taller, mature trees are typically above and safe from the flames. Farmers around Robombeh have traditionally harvested any available wood to burn under piles of earth to make high quality charcoal. The charcoal is bagged and sold as fuel for stoves in Freetown and elsewhere in Sierra Leone.

Fire is a danger in Koinadugu District also, where I was yesterday, but that heavily forested and hilly region suffers from traditional “slash and burn” agriculture, rather than the charcoal trade. Heifer is working there to train farmers in integrated agriculture that will replenish, rather than deplete the soil.

In the video below, Heifer Senior Project Officer Val Koker talks about the Sabenti Women’s Farmers Association.

Bill Fitzgerald is Heifer International’s creative director. You can read his previous posts about project visits in Sierra Leone here. 

A wood pile smolders as it’s burned into charcoal

Bagged charcoal ready for sale

Cashew seedling planted by a Heifer-sponsored group

A mature cashew tree

How Heifer Projects Are Promoting a Healthy Environment

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On April 18, Worldwatch Institute’s blog, Nourishing the Planet, published a list of 15 ways agriculture can “promote a healthier environment and a more food-secure future.” In honor of Earth Day 2011, we would like to explore these 15 ways and how Heifer’s projects around the world are addressing these issues. We’ll do this in three separate posts, matching five Heifer projects with the corresponding Nourishing the Planet concepts.


1. Guaranteeing the Right to Food
The goals of the National More Organic for Everyone (MORE) Project are to increase organic producers’ supply, improve access to high-quality organic food by underserved communities in Arkansas, Georgia, Kansas City, Minnesota, New York and Wisconsin and identify opportunities to strengthen the linkages between organic producers and communities in food desert areas. This project is helping 60 farmers initiate or make the transition to organic production while providing organic food to 600 food-insecure families.
In the words of a MORE Project participant in Georgia:
My name is Alfred, 64 and a half years young. And having lost my job, this is the best thing that could have ever happened to me, preparing myself to become an organic backyard gardener. The experiences and classes I am having I would have never gotten from books alone. Specifically when working hand-in-hand with the volunteer farmers, I am learning to do various things in different ways and learning to adapt them to my specific needs and requirements.

Since I started the project, I finished building several raised and standard beds, which are planted, harvested and producing already. I’ve improved my methods of seeding, learned the proper way to compost and learned the principles of crop rotation, planning and companion planting. I’ve also started building a walk-in hoop-house. And if everything works out okay, I’m planning to sell at local farmers markets soon.



2. Harnessing the Nutritional and Economic Potential of Vegetables.

Heifer’s Empowering Marginalized Communities in Northern Thailand Project assists 1,170 minority families in nine poor communities. Families receive sows, piglets, fruit saplings, crop seeds and vegetable seeds. In this project, kitchen gardens are one of the activities that help villagers reduce daily food expenses.
Mr. Alu and Mrs. Muba Yaesaw are participants of the project. Before, the family made their living from selling wild products at Wednesday and Saturday markets. But after becoming project participants, they began growing a kitchen garden for home consumption and sale. They grow both native and wild vegetables. Their family’s nutrition has improved from the more diverse diet. In addition to selling at the market two days a week, they sell their vegetables from a mobile shop within the village and nearby villages and at special events. Mr. Alu said that after growing their own vegetables, they did not have to buy vegetables for more than a year. They also shared vegetables with their neighbors and guests who came to their village.

3. Reducing Food Waste

To diversify the income streams of families benefiting from the gift of livestock, Heifer Sierra Leone entered into a partnership in 2010 with the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA). This partnership has resulted in the distribution of high-yielding cassava varieties to supplement project families’ agricultural inputs, diet and income. Cassava, also called yuca or manoic, is a woody shrub native to South America. Cassava is the third-largest source of carbohydrates for meals in the world. However, one of the challenges of cassava production is its relatively short post-harvest storage capacity. To preserve this staple food year-round in areas where there is no refrigeration, it is often processed into garri, a kind of cereal that keeps for long period. It is sometimes turned into fried chips and eaten as a snack. An additional benefit of cassava is that the peels are good for feeding animals, and the leaves are made into a nutritious stew.
The Tongea Women Farmers in Kailahun district are one of the groups that has benefitted from Heifer’s partnership with IITA. Along with various trainings they received from Heifer, the group also received cassava cuttings, which they planted in a group garden. Because their cassava production was so successful, IITA contributed further to the project by having two cassava-processing centers built. These facilities have become a resource for the women who engage in homemade garri processing and other cassava products. Garri and other foods processed from cassava sell at higher market value than the cassava plant itself, and the women are now learning that by adding value to their farm products, they are able to generate real income to improve their livelihoods and those of their family members.
4. Feeding Cities.
The population of El Alto in La Paz, Bolivia, largely consists of families who have migrated from the Bolivian highlands. As part of the rural-to-urban migration process, these families often exchange their healthy, traditional diets of Andean crops for por quality, highly processed and carbohydrate-rich foods, resulting in the high rates of both malnutrition and obesity among the urban poor. Heifer’s Restoring the Consumption of Native Foods in El Alto, La Paz Project promotes food security in eight peri-urban communities in El Alto. Heifer works to improve the eating habits of school children and their families through advocacy with local decision-makers, strengthening of the network of social control of the School Boards, and community awareness-raising as a strategy to recover and consume the vast diversity of healthy traditional Andean products.
5. Getting More Crop per Drop.
Small farmers in the Piura region of Peru live in poverty. Approximately 35,000 families live in this territory, and their livelihoods are vitally dependent on the region’s ecosystem. They are affected by El Nino floods, which deteriorate roads and isolate communities. They are equally affected by subsequent drought years, which come as regularly as El Nino and bring with them forest fires. The Building a Sustainable Way of Life Project is turning the threat of El Nino into a major opportunity for families living in the dry forest. During the yet years, the project replants trees, bushes and pastures; builds grain storage sheds and improves housing conditions to protect against heavy rains. Communal wells are being improved, and equipment is provided to ensure the availability and quality of water in yet years and dry.

How Heifer is Helping the World Feed Itself

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Earlier today I posted about a Heifer project participant being included in The Economist’s report, The 9 billion-people question: A special report on feeding the world. And if you’re keyed in to media coverage of sustainable agriculture, you’ve probably seen the conversation around the web on the United Nations Report, Agroecology and the Right to Food (Mark Bittman has written about it on the New York Times Opinionator blog, and Paula Crossfield for Huffington Post, to name a couple).
Both reports look at the seemingly impossible challenge of feeding all 9 billion people who are estimated to be living on Earth by 2050, and they offer different perspectives. Will we feed the world by investing in the highest-yielding crop or livestock species? Or by investing in agroecology? (Heifer has been practicing agroecology all over the world since the mid 1980s and established an Agroecology Initiative in 2000.)
I worry, though, that the theme of “feeding the world” diverts our attention from the local, on-the-ground work that needs to be done. Heifer takes on the task of ending hunger and poverty with this sort of community approach, and it’s an approach that we’ve proven works.
Ours is a bottom-up approach. We work with the very poor to help them rebuild assets and develop agriculturally and economically active livelihoods. We build strong community groups where people work together to share their limited resources and to plan their vision of a better life. At this stage, much training takes place. Participants learn improved ways to tend animals, how to best use animal by-products, water management and erosion control practices, and often even improved literacy and leadership skills.
A transformation process begins to happen within the community when the members realize that improvements in knowledge lead to improvements in health, income, relationships and eventually to their values. We call this a holistic transformation.
Once this transformation is underway, the community uses their knowledge to impact the policies, systems and practices that impact their surroundings (both societal and environmental). Community empowerment at the grassroots level can lead to changes in infrastructure to help build local commerce–roads, electricity, commodity storage and transportation, as well as market associations and structures.
We’ve seen our model work again and again, in all corners of the world (and even in our own backyard). Our challenge now is to ratchet up this model so we can begin to see our impacts on a larger scale, as we have with our East Africa Dairy Development Project. As communities begin to feed themselves, international hunger statistics will begin to come down. The need for wealthy countries to ship commodities to poor countries will decrease–countries will be growing their own food.
Left: Bolivia (photo by Geoff Bugbee), Top: Cambodia (photo by Matt Bradley)
Botton: Armenia (photo by Russ Powell), Right: Zambia (photo by Jake Lyell
And then the question of whether conventional agriculture is more productive or if sustainable/organic/agroecological agriculture is better will become a non-issue.
Can we do it alone? Of course not. We need help from individuals like you, from partner nonprofits and non-government organizations, and from governments–wealthy and poor alike.