(Above: Curt Bowen, right, and Joseph Bornstein)
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.
“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.”
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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.
