Food Security Archive

Semilla Nueva: Planting new seeds in Guatemala

By
Tracy Barnett
Published: June 1, 2010Posted in: Featured, Food Security, Forest protection, Guatemala, Organic agriculture, Semilla Nueva, WhyTags: , , , , , ,
Semilla Nueva: Planting new seeds in Guatemala

(Above: Curt Bowen, right, and Joseph Bornstein)

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ALMOLONGA, Guatemala – Ramón Siquina has depended on insecticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers like everyone else in this green produce basket of the Quetzaltenango province. But nowadays, he’s using fewer of them.

“Fertilizers have helped us a lot, and it was a great advance for us,” he said. “But we’ve been conscious that the state of our soil is deteriorating. We began using lots of fertilizers, fungicides and pesticides, which we wouldn’t have to use if the land was still rich like in the times of our forefathers.”

We’re standing on the roof of his cement-block home, a soft mist descending over the green valleys and hills surrounding us. Almalonga, a community of 20,000 on the outskirts of Xela, is unusual in that the forefathers saved the richest soils in the valley for agriculture, and built the homes around the fields and up into the hills. For years the community has produced the huge truckloads of cabbage, squash, corn, lettuce and radishes that feed the city, but it’s getting harder.

“I’ve struggled and struggled with this piece of land; I put all the chemicals possible on it, and it still didn’t produce,” Ramón was saying. “I realized I had to change the way I was growing.”

That’s when he met the folks from Semilla Nueva (meaning “new seed” in Spanish), a new organization formed by a group of high school and college buddies from the Pacific Northwest. They began to talk about farming practices and Rafael shared his problem. Curt Bowen and Trinidad Recinos, two of the group’s founders, suggested compost as an alternative to chemical fertilizer and offered to help him set up a composting vermiculture project, and that’s how we all ended up tonight on Ramón’s roof, with Ramón and Joseph combing through the garbage to examine the progress of the squirming colonies of worms.
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“God gives us a way of showing us what we need,” said Ramón. “It’s a small project now, but one day it will be big.”

****

Oregonian Joseph Bornstein was just 18 when he made his first trip to Nicaragua with a couple of buddies from the Ashland High School Class of 2003 in Oregon. They had decided to take a gap year to travel in Central America before beginning college.

“We’d learned a lot about the world from books and from our desks, but we wanted to learn about it for ourselves.”

The friends made their way down to San Juan del Sur, a fishing village near the border with Costa Rica, where they made a friendship that would change their lives. Their friend was Alix Fermin, a fisherman and a father of a delightful 3-year-old.

“He was such a loving, joy-filled person,” recalls Bornstein wistfully. The friends spent some carefree days with the family, learning about the family’s culture and way of life. Three months later, they learned that Alix had died in a fishing accident – a not uncommon occurrence, given the rudimentary nature of the equipment the poor villagers used in those parts.

“We put our heads together to see if there was a way we could provide a long-term form of support for the family, since their breadwinner was no more,” Bornstein said. The friends decided to pool their resources and build a house that the family could rent out so they would always have income. They raised $8,000 and headed south in 2005 to build the home.

In the interim, much had changed. A spike in the petroleum prices had caused the prices of basic necessities to double. “That woke us up to the need for more structural change,” said Bornstein.

That was when Curt Bowen, a college buddy, got into the picture. By that time, Bowen and Bornstein were studying at Whitman College in Washington State and hit on the idea of building a biofuel network in Central America, teaching local farmers. They laid the groundwork for a series of workshops throughout the Americas and made plans to establish resource centers in each community. The idea was to teach organized communities, community leaders, and non-profits processor fabrication and biofuel production. Two professors from Whitman helped them design an independent study course, and a friend in Antigua offered to loan them a Guatemalan chicken bus for the experiment, and they were set.

They converted the bus for biodiesel, and with 400 gallons of the stuff, made their way from Washington State all the way down to Nicaragua, teaching farmers and community members how to convert waste crop materials to fuel and setting up an infrastructure to keep the project going after they left.

The project was a good one, but as their studies progressed, they realized that it didn’t really address a more fundamental issue.

“For biofuels to be done well, you have to start with organic agriculture,” said Curt. Much of the world’s biofuel production is coming from palm oil forests in Indonesia and Malaysia, he pointed out; 89 percent of rainforest deforestations come from biofuel production. Making matters worse is that after the forests are slashed, the peat bogs underlying them are drained and burned to make more biofuels, and the resultant emissions have made Indonesia the third largest producer of greenhouse gases.

A sad and ironic turn of events for a supposedly green technology.

So the friends began to think of ways they could work with local farmers to promote a more sustainable approach to agriculture, and they recruited more friends from Whitman and from Ashland for their next project: Semilla Nueva. They also contacted Trinidad, a Guatemalan palm oil grower they had met on the biodiesel trip who had embraced their project with such an innovative spirit they recruited him to join their project.

One of the first things they did was visit the Ministry of Agriculture, where they were brought into an office with an impressive desk made of tropical wood. Embedded in the design was a small plaque: “Donated by Dow Chemical Co.” Soon they noticed the plush sofa had been donated by Monsanto.

“It turned out that every piece of furniture in that place had been donated by a chemical company,” laughed Curt.

Guatemalan agriculture has been heavily dominated by the chemical industry and utilizes products that were banned in the states a long time ago, resulting in damaging runoff, pesticide poisoning of unprotected workers, depleted soils and other ills, they explained.

Alternative farming practices had been introduced in the country, but there’s little support and follow-through with these projects, Curt said. In a country of more than a corn million farmers, there are 17 government corn specialists available to offer assistance.

There are a number of NGOs currently working in the country on sustainable agriculture projects, but most are isolated from each other and working on specific projects, Semilla Nueva’s goal, with the help of a Dutch organization called Gota Verde (Green Drop), was to fill in the gaps.

“One of the biggest problems in development is not a lack of technology; it’s getting that technology out to the people who need it,” said Curt. “For example, conservation tillage – a practice that’s very easy to use, but nobody’s using it here because nobody’s promoting it.”

Now they’re working on a variety of projects in the surrounding countryside, and one that they’re most excited about is a joint project with a Spanish NGO called Intervida. They will be training promotores, or community-based educators, who are already working for Intervida to spread the word about (health??). Now they’ll also be able to teach sustainable farming techniques, from composting and contour ditches to living barriers and shuffle hoes.

The pair’s faces light up when they talk about “action research,” a strategy for working together with local farmers to experiment their way toward the best practices for each farm. Just as Ramón is measuring the progress of his two differently managed vermiculture bins, local farmers will be experimenting with techniques that allow them to wean their dependence from chemical inputs.

Now with a new associate, Darren Yondorf, and with two more staff members on the way, the group will be fully staffed within two weeks – just in time to receive the first round of volunteers from Yale, Kentucky University, the University of Puget Sound and of course their alma mater Whitman College. The volunteers will be living out on the farms, working with farmers to help them incorporate the new practices and monitor the results.

But the most ambitious part of their project is perhaps the most important, and also the hardest to measure. By working within local farmer associations and helping to build others, they are hoping to build community leadership through sustainable agriculture practices.

“As the promotores become involved in the research, the impact will grow,” said Curt. “We’re trying to promote sustainable agriculture, but we’re trying to build unity in the community as well.”


Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Farm to Table, Bolivia to Santa Fe

By
Tracy Barnett
Published: March 27, 2010Posted in: Bolivia, Featured, Food Security, Permaculture, Santa Fe, WhyTags: , , , , , ,
Farm to Table, Bolivia to Santa Fe

By Anne Banas
Esperanza Project guest writer

Born in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and of Quechua descent, agronomist Emigdio Ballon has built an impressive resume when it comes to helping communities throughout the world restore their connection to traditional yet sustainable farming practices.

He is Director of Agriculture at Tesuque Pueblo near Santa Fe, co-founder of Seeds of Change, and Executive Director of Four Bridges Traveling Permaculture Institute. As a plant geneticist, he has done extensive research on quinoa and amaranth grains, and has studied biodynamic farming, which involves a unified and self-sustaining approach to agriculture that follows natural earth cycles and cosmic rhythms, particularly lunar cycles. As if that wasn’t enough, he also practices ancient planting rituals, which he learned from his shaman grandfather in Bolivia.

This past winter, I attended the first ever Edible Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a meeting of influential writers and advocates dedicated to promoting integrity and security in our food supply. While a thick blanket of snow coated the city, notable voices such as Grist food editor Tom Philpott and localvore cookbook author Deborah Madison (a localvore, in case you hadn’t heard, is a person who tries to consume only locally produced food, to the greatest extent possible) gathered inside the warmth of Bishop’s Lodge Ranch to discuss our foodshed—defined as the flow of our food in a given area, from farm to table, and any aspect in between—and how we as local food enthusiasts can contribute to its betterment.

For many of us, it was a time to bond with like-minded thinkers and garner story ideas. But it took the quiet fire of Emigdio to invite spirit into the conference room and inspire us beyond words.

His panel, “The Southwest Foodshed: Sustaining the Culinary Heritage of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma,”—shared by Deborah Madison, as well as food and farming advocates Miguel Estaban and Gary Paul Nabha—focused on his work in New Mexico, particularly at the Tesuque Pueblo. His words, however, resonated at a global level and beyond.

Miguel Esteban, Emigdio Ballon, Deborah Madison and Gary Paul Nabha

Before he began his talk, this otherwise reserved and quiet man stood up and asked the spirit world, in his native Quechua, for guidance on what to say to all of us. After kissing the earth, as part of his ceremony, he reached down and picked up a produce box filled with natural products—an ear of “Mother Corn,” a jar of local honey, a bottled herbal remedy. He spoke emphatically as he held up one item after another, each a symbol of both abundance and loss. His accent was strong, but his message was clear. All of us have become separate from the land, but “we have to be in connection with the spirits because Mother Earth has given us everything,” he said.

Like perhaps many others in the room—mostly farmers, activists, food writers, and publishers ofEdible Communities magazines who are well versed in the subject at hand—I was mesmerized as much as I was moved.

His concern for indigenous people was far from sentimental and came with a signal of warning. He explained how even native cultures are caught by the “great dependency for this humanity,” where laws and mechanization fostered by society and corporations have caused them to “forget what their ancestors taught” with regard to growing food. He explained how his people successfully grew quinoa for over 1,000 years on dry land. “It worked because they knew how,” he said. “Indian people already have knowledge of ‘new’ techniques like biodynamics, [but] we forgot them because society demanded profit.”

“For what?” he asks. “For killing people.”

Once he finished, he sat down just as quietly as he stood up. There was a silent pause in the room, and then everyone in the audience burst out with a heartfelt ovation.

The danger he refers to is the use of genetic engineering, which not only keeps farmers dependent on big corporations for seed stock but also results in sub-par food quality that doesn’t provide much nutrition and is potentially poisonous to our health. Also, he said, many farmers have been more or less tricked into buying “terminator seeds” (seeds that can’t be replanted after being harvested) which they can’t afford to re-purchase year after year. Faced with financial ruin, some have even resorted to suicide.

But there’s hope. Much of Emigdio’s work specifically focuses on helping native communities to become self-sufficient by teaching them the importance of saving seeds that are “descendants from Mother Corn” rather than continuing to farm with genetically modified seeds. After the panel, I sat down with him for a few minutes to talk about how he employs this philosophy at Four Bridges Traveling Permaculture Institute (permaculture, a concept that began as permanent + agriculture, has evolved into a design system that promotes a “permanent culture” in every aspect, striving for communities in harmony with nature).

He told me that his main goal for the organization is to “bring together a community of people of Hispaniola to help them become independent in the way they produce food.” The keyword in the name of the organization is “travelling,” which indicates how he spends much of his time helping poor farmers and communities in other countries as well as in New Mexico.

Similar to the theme of his talk, he told me how each culture has a traditional way to practice farming but has become very separated from it, where their ancestors have “lived 1,000 years one way but now use fertilizer and pesticides.” When I asked how he thinks the revival of agricultural traditions can contribute to a more sustainable future globally, he explained how everyone needs to understand the quality and benefit of “clean food,” and that “overall, these efforts will help humanity, not just indigenous people.”

To see his work up close, he invited me to visit Four Bridges’ home base, Sken:nen Ken’hak (Peace Forever) Educational Farm, which he started with Lorraine Kahneratokwas Gray, a member if the Mohawk Nation from upstate New York. In less than a year, the couple has built a solid foundation for an educational center for children and anyone else interested in seeing how a closed-system farm works. While still in its early stages, the farm will soon serve as a working model for what Emigdio and Lorraine teach around the world, particularly in Latin America.

While I missed Emigdio, who was off fetching a new hutch for their eight recently donated rabbits, Lorraine was excited to show me their new goats and take me around the three-acre property. With a four-month-old puppy tugging at my pant leg and Lorraine’s gaggle of curious children close behind, we walked past a row of fruit trees and into a cleared field primed to serve as a “three sisters” (corn, beans, and squash) garden. A good portion of the side yard is set up as a pen for goats, turkeys, chickens, and other farm animals, and future projects include an herb garden and a building to house workshops for making soaps and other products like the healing salve Lorraine gave me as a souvenir.

But it’s not just about farming and teaching. For them, it’s also about reconnecting to nature in the deepest sense. Behind the small house was a newly laid labyrinth, and soon, they hope to build a wooden fence to ensure privacy for moon and other spiritual ceremonies (Mohawk, Quechua, and others). “Not only can people see a more sustainable model for farming, but also share traditions. Anyone wanting to do something spiritual is welcome,” she said.

Even though I didn’t officially partake in a ceremony, I internalized quite a bit about how our survival might be dependent on reconnecting to the source in a multitude of ways. As I walked to my car with a hand in my pocket, lightly grazing the jar of healing salve with my fingers, I reflected on what Emigdio said at the panel about how “Mother Earth has given us everything.” I took one last look at the beginnings of the farm and was filled with a new sense of hope and motivation. I thought to myself, “Yes, if we just start somewhere, no matter how small, one by one, we can help restore this connection, heal the earth, and ultimately heal ourselves.”