A team in SW Haiti wants to start a project to provide land to local farmers using areas between the rows of young mango trees. The area has had a cc/gm treatment and the seeds would be provided. We would appreciate any advice about how to set this up.
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Hi Gordon,
Thanks for calling my attention to this. I’m happy to talk them and see if my team can help in some way. Feel free to give them my email and/or Whatsapp.
rgietz@hotmail.com
+1 586-838-0404
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Thanks. They have worked out a plan and we will be discussing it soon.
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First of all be interested in how old the young mango trees are and if you have irrigation for them. Also what is the rainfall and range of slopes. You may want to train in water harvesting for the mango trees if you don’t have irrigation. You may want to intercrop with living mulch (I like this term better than gm/cc). You may want to offer “ripping” along both sides of the green manure cover crop for a price since ripping will reduce competition and release nutrients from the gm/cc/living mulch to the crop, particularly when they are planted in rows. Younger mango trees may benefit from being encircled with a fast growing legume to provide partial shade and that shade may be offered to the crops. Also green manure from living mulch or from legume trees can be put in planting holes as per the Farming God’s Way system. I have agroforestry systems you can use that are unique and not on the internet that give you maximal opportunity to manage for shade the time of day you want it (afternoon) and the time of year you want it (dry season). I would encourage and train the farmers to not use the land for agronomic crops but high value crops determined by the market and any value addition opportunity that is possible. My email is janzen200@yahoo.com and can provide you with new and more efficient types of agroforestry systems and I can help you get the most of those systems. Mulch and human urine are good concepts to teach. The big mistake most farmers make is not doing income per hour or return on investment calculations and record keep and with them do analysis of crop production systems based on the market. Savings groups should be encouraged and cooperatives constrained to only a few functions only such as group purchase of inputs, group purchase of value addition processing equipment and group processing and group marketing. Having cooperatives do what they are inefficient at doing will cause them to fail the same as socialism tends to fail because of lack of individual incentive. You may want to have some thing that the farmers are required to do in exchange such as build water harvesting structures for the mangoes or weeding for the mangoes or mulching the mangoes and provide an equivalent of labor for the seed so that they learn the value of exchange and this does not move them in the direction of dependency and entitlement.
Thanks for the info. They use solar pumped irrigation. Looking less for cultural info and more from someone who has experience with the concept
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