Feeding the Soil for a Better Coffee Harvest

As organic farmers know, it’s much more important over the long term to feed the soil than to feed a plant.  Using nutrients that a plant needs only in the moment (essentially what chemical fertilizers provide) would be like eating nothing but a bag of potato chips every time you felt faint, but never sitting down to hearty meal.  Organic farmers, and certifiers, know that the best way to nourish a plant is to feed the soil, with fertilizers that not only contain the nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium that the chemical fertilizers contain, but also organic matter and micro-nutrients that a plant needs in much smaller amounts and that ultimately improve the texture, drainage, and composition of the soil.

Small farmers remove the coffee cherry pulp with a hand-cranked mill.

On one hand organic coffee farmers have excellent materials to make organic fertilizers but on the other hand they can be limited by the restrictions placed on them by certification bodies.  The first and most widely used ingredient for organic fertilizer on a coffee farm is the fruit from the coffee cherries.  On small farms, the cherries are often de-pulped on the farm and then seeds, or coffee beans, are dried and transported to a processing plant owned by the cooperative or a private company.  The fruit of the cherries contains phosphorus and adds organic matter to the soil, but farmers add manure, either chicken or cattle, to the compost to create a nitrogen rich fertilizer that both boosts the plants growth short-term and gradually improves the quality of the soil over seasons.

A farmer who dedicates time and labor to producing fertilizer for high quality coffee feels as proud of his compost as he is of the end product!

While recycling the cherry fruits and any manure you have around the farm into your soil is something that every farmer should do (and many coffee farmers do), in Nicaragua conventional coffee farmers are at an advantage over organic farmers in that they have the possibility of augmenting their fruit with purchased fertilizers.  Because there are no commercially available certified organic fertilizers here, the smallest farmers who are certified organic struggle to feed their soils.  Unless they have enough land to dedicate several acres to cattle and harvest their own manure, they are prohibited by the certification bodies of adding the manure from any neighboring farms, unless the neighboring farm’s cattle production is certified organic (virtually unheard of here).

Central small-farmer Cooperatives are now dedicating time and resources to improving the fertilizers available to small farmers, often hand in hand with small roasters from abroad who purchase the coffee and are very supportive of the cooperative in maintaining the highest quality coffee and yields possible.  Bocashi is a japanese method of making compost which actively supports the growth of micro-organisms which help to break down nutrients in the soil and make them available to the plants.  Farmers can make bocashi using rice husks, dried coffee cherries, a starch, and unrefined sugar; all ingredients that are readily available to the rural areas.  Another powerful fertilizer is bio-ferment, an excellent way for small farmers to stretch the small amount of cow manure they produce over several acres of coffee plant.  Bio-ferment is a foliar fertilizer, which mixes cow manure, milk, sugar and mineral salts into a nutrient-rich spray that is absorbed directly into the leaves of the plant.

Having a commercially available certified organic fertilizer will help some small farmers maintain their certifications.

Some cooperatives are able to invest in more direct support for their farmers.  The SOPPEXCCA cooperative in Jinotega has built a fertilizer plant, and they are currently producing certified organic fertilizer for their own cooperative members.  This is just one great example of how a well run cooperative can provide much more to its members than a guaranteed market.

To be successful, an organic farmer needs to be able to produce the necessary ingredients and labor to make fertilizers on-farm or has to have a commercially available product that is affordable.  Etico has been focusing recently on helping cooperatives with both of these strategies, that will ultimately lead to better coffee and a healthier environment.

 

Here are some more quick, personal updates from our patio garden and mini-zoo.

We harvested the head of little bananas (bananito rosa) that was growing over the roof; I was worried it was leaning on the roofing and going to cook in the heat where it touched, and the bananas looked fat and plump.  I think we could have left it a tad longer, but we also wanted to eat them while Nick’s parents were here.  We’ve been waiting for two and a half years for that banana plant to give us a head!!  The plantain trees the project I worked with nearby sprouted a head every eight months, so now I understand one reason why these little bananitos are more expensive in the markets.  What our plant lost in speed it made up for in quantity – there were over 125 bananitos on the head!

(Bananas and plantains have heads, hands, and fingers: the whole stalk of fruit is the head, each double row of bananas is a hand, and each individual fruit is refered to as a finger).

It’s best to harvest a head right before it starts to ripen, because otherwise birds and hungry pests attach feverishly.  So we hung the head up in our patio to ripen.  Every morning we examined the top fruit looking for yellow blush.  When the first turned yellow, we picked them too soon but grudgingly swallowed the starchy not-very sweet bites because they were just so valuable.  When after a week the head ripened – like a living firework, spreading downward – it caught us off guard.  Within two days the entire head ripened to soft super sweet bananas and then blackened and they began falling off by themselves.  Begin: banana eating marathon.  Bananas on cereal in the morning, bananas for dessert after lunch, banano con leche in the afternoon, banana cake after dinner, bananas for all the neighbors!  Everyone enjoyed the banana binge, and hopefully we won’t have to wait two and half years for the next of the six teenage plants we have to sprout a head.

Katharine, Nick’s mother, did some beautiful paintings during their month-long visit, inspired by our patio container garden and the bright red cock’s comb that are blooming now.  Most of our plants began as cuttings urped from someone elses garden or seeds I picked up someone on my adventures.  The cock’s comb were taken as seeds from some flowers I bought on the day of the dead (November 2).  It’s a flower that is used traditionally to decorate gravestones.

The flower grows like a giant tumor, starting small and then growing riplier and curlier, and the seeds actually mature at the base of the flower and begin to fall out while it is still blooming, so they are very easy to collect.  These are the second generation I’ve planted here.

At the end of her visit, Katharine decided to give one of her paintings of Arsen (el gato) and our plants to Maria Jose, a good friend who helps us around the house and is the life of the party at all of our gatherings, for her birthday.

Have you ever known a monogamous cat?  Arsen has now had two sets of kittens with the same tortoise-shell gata from next door, and is so affectionate!  He calls her over when we put food out, and they lie around together on the cool patio in the evening.  She was initially very shy with us but is getting bolder, and now comes over and now asks for food directly!  We don’t feed her unless Arsen is asking too.  We just found out that he also hangs out over at the neighbors.  He has never brought any other cats in to our house, only her!  They always greet each other with nose bumps and tail sniffing.  This morning I caught them smooching on the wall behind the bananas.  

We have one broody hen right now who is sitting on eight green eggs, due to hatch three days before Easter.  The most common green-egg breeds in the states are Aracauna and Americauna, but I think probably all of what we have would be called “Easter Eggers”, or mixed breed unknown heritage chickens that lay beautiful eggs.  One little girl who lays green eggs laid an enormous double yolker.  Smallest chicken we have, biggest egg I’ve ever seen!  I’ll never get bored of all the colored eggs we get, and have ridiculous numbers of pictures of them.

We had a chicken health adventure this past weekend.  One blond lady was down in the soil panting, sitting in her own poo, and wouldn’t get up or even move.  She’s done this before – one time I was there and hand fed her some water, carried her over to the water feeder, and she perked up.  Another time Melania was house sitting and said she gave it a baby amoxicillin in water and said it got better.  This time she looked pretty bad, and to make matters worse had a wound on her back from the rooster trying to mount her while she was down, so I decided to do some research.  After consulting the omniscient internet, I did the following:

- isolated her from the rest of the flock in our patio, in a makeshift cage made of chairs on their sides.

- narrowed the symptoms down to two probable causes: egg bind (stuck egg) or blocked crop (food stuck in her digestive system).  I felt around her chest and abdomen for signs of either, and decided it was blocked crop.  She had a large lump in her chest about the size of a small peach that was hard and lumpy (like pebbles packed together with clay).

- with the help of Nick, we gave her a 1/4 teaspoon of virgin sesame oil with a tiny bit of powder from an amoxicillin capsule every six hours to lubricate her system.  I kept feeding her lots of water, and giving her crop a little massage every twenty minutes to help move things along.

- overnight, some major sticky dry poos and now she’s standing up for the first time!  Seems to have worked.  Some hydrogen peroxide on the wounds on her back, and I think after another day of cooked rice she might be ready to go back to the flock.  success (we hope!)

 

Mi Huerto

It’s summer, the dry drought filled half of the year in the western plains of Nicaragua.  Dust invades your life and your respiratory system as the green fields along the highways turn into brown desertscapes.  First the peanuts are harvested, then the sugar cane begins to dry up until it is finally burned and harvested, adding clouds of black smoke to the dust filled air.  Cattle trample into the bare peanut fields after the gleaners are gone to chew mouthfulls of dusty peanut cud.  The middle of the day is suffocatingly hot.

Making leaf compost has made all the difference to our garden! It's not common here, usually all organic trash is burnt.

Although I have seen marked improvement in the infrastructure here over the last three years (read: from power cuts twice a week to maybe once a month), during the dry months there is still no running water in our section of the city from 7am until 5 or 6pm on a daily basis.  If we failed to remember to fill our trash cans and barrels at night, the next day we were scrounging for water to flush or drink, forget throwing any on the dusty backyard!   Now, thanks to a 750 gallon water tank and electric pump that Nick installed last year at our house, we’ve been able to create a fresh green micro-climate at our house.  The inner courtyard is lined with herbs and flowers in pots, and the backyard has another herb garden at the back of it.  Over the last two years I’ve fought hand, tooth and nail against our urban pests – garrobos (iguanas) and leaf cutter ants, eventually finding the best tactic to be avoiding those plants which they find the tastiest (unfortunately, among those we find the tastiest as well, such as squash and beans!).  We’ve also been most diligent composters, and I was delighted to find that with the constant heat of León I can churn out a whole batch of rich dark compost in just a few months, especially in the rainy season when the moisture level is up.  The compost has made an enormous difference in the soil over two years, and now there are plants thriving where there was compacted construction rubble-filled earth before.  The result is a compromised garden of smelly, spiky, and odd plants that garrobos and leaf cutter ants don’t like, but that we DO like and eat happily.  Oh, and our ever-changing fauna, which have included over the last two years 11 chickens, 2 blue-winged teals, a chompipe (turkey), two turtles, and various cats.  Along with the constant march of visitors that pass through (both foreign and Nicaraguan!), our house is generally interesting and chaotic, and we like it that way!

This is what our back yard looked like when I moved in two years ago and double dug the first raised beds:

And this is how it looks now, with a chicken coop, water tank, lemon grass, pineapple, oregano, chili and ginger plants.  This is during the dry season – if I had taken this picture four months ago it would have been alot greener!

A banana plant I brought when I moved in finally sprouted a head of bananas – over the roof!  They are mini bananas, called banano manzana or banano rosa here.

Trimming the banana flower off (should be done once the flower produces several “false” hands of bananas) provided us with an excellent excuse to climb up on the roof and enjoy a different view of Sutiaba, and our patio!  Most of the plants inside are ornamental, except for the mint, oregano, italian and thai basil, and this miniature basil that we found near Masaya and has an incredible flavor.

In our chicken coop, our first chicks hatched two weeks ago!  The first hatched during a day I was working from home, so I kept checking on it and got to see it when it was first hatched.  The neighbors all tsked tsked when the mother left the nest and a different hen jumped in.  We feared the worst but then the hen just ate the egg shell and skin, and snuggled the chick until the mother finished eating and they swapped places.  Some excellent chicken co-parenting!

The second chick was born during the night.  Two out of the three eggs hatched – not bad!

I am very excited to discover how well ginger grows here!  I started with a bit from the supermarket, and have just heaped compost on it and done virtually nothing else.  9 months later my friend Alejandra helped me harvest this one.  You can see the original piece hanging down on the right – to our surprise it was still fat and not shriveled!  I cut it off and re-planted it, we’ll see if it sprouts again.  Garlic has failed, I think I haven’t been able to find the right seed (most of available garlic even in the local markets is from China).  Plans to try sesame, turmeric and many more flowers next!

 

Creating the Future

Recently the Reforestation Project I work for organized a workshop at a primary school in one of the communities where we have worked with farmers to diversify their farms.  The topic of the workshop was, Reforestation and Soil Conservation.  Given that we have in the two-and-a-half year span of this project we have only worked with adults, we worked intentionally to create a presentation that included lots of images, and thought of some “ice-breakers” to engage the students.  Since we expected to work with fourth through sixth graders, we also planned an activity with them to measure the slope of the garden behind the school and make a terrace with them.  Conveying the concept of soil erosion and also teaching the math involved in calculating the average of a slope was ambitious, but the kids were great!

You can never plan perfectly, and sure enough the other teacher at the two-room school house asked if her kids could come to the presentation as well.  So her class of first through third graders joined us as well and instead of 16 kids we had 31!  We started by asking each student to introduce themselves and give the name of a Nicaraguan tree they like.  We got a lot of good answers – nispero, mango, and sacuanjoche – before the kids decided that manzana (which is not a Nicaraguan tree, but an imported fruit that is very popular around Christmas time) was the coolest answer and it was hard to get them back thinking about native fruits.

The presentation started with illustrating the water cycle, and then focussing on the section of the cycle where the rain falls on hillsides and it washes into rivers and out into lakes or ocean.  Then we split the classes into two different activities.

It worked quite well!  The older kids grasped the concept and became very efficient at using the Aparato A to mark and measure the slope.  A young girl took the job of hammering in the stakes at 4m intervals, and two different students wrote down the measurements every 2 meters so they could divide into groups afterward and calculate the average.  The students are lucky to have one of the farmers in our project as a teacher, and he has clearly brought environmental values to the curriculum and school environment.  The yard was trash-free and planted with a wide variety of fruit trees, and a little patch of corn and beans.  When the teacher noticed the yard eroding, he asked the students to bring in large soda bottles, which they buried neck down around the lower edge of the school yard, creating a little wall has been successfully collecting topsoil so that by now many of the bottles are nearly completely buried.

The younger students worked with me to create two scenarios, farmer Ricardo and farmer Juan who live opposite sides of the same mountain.  One cuts all his trees down to sell the wood and plant corn.  The other cuts his trees down to sell the lumber, but plants new trees in terraces along the level of the mountain and corn in parallel rows up the side of the mountain. We simulated the farms by laying a wooden board at an angle, covering it with earth, and then making rain with a watering can, washing the soil off.  The we repeated the excercise, but laying rocks in rows along the board with weed draped across them.  Some of the soil washed off, but more of it caught on the rocks and stayed in muddy rows along the terraces.

At the end of the morning, we gathered the older students to review the different components, and asked them what they would like to do or study.  Only one student said he wanted to farm; the other students said doctors, teachers, firefighters, even one said he wanted to be an architect.  Unfortunately, probably not all of them will graduate high school and a small percentage will probably successfully graduate from college.  Access to higher education is improving in Nicaragua, but many obstacles still stand in the way.

Returning to the office, my colleagues said they were a bit disapointed that so few of the students had mentioned “rural careers” and that they hadn’t been able to convince more of the kids of the importance of good farming.  I had had the opposite reaction, and was thrilled so see so much ambition and creative ideas from the kids.  Most of them live on farms, and it’s understandable for them to want something different than their parents at their age.  Whether they go on to further study or not, many of them will probably end up inheriting land from their families, and could even have the possibility of both farming and having a trade or profession (like their teacher, who has a fruit and honey farm in the village).  If we are truly working with sustainable rural development, which should enrich the rural areas and create environments that encourage the youth to stay and not emigrate to the cities, and the best way to acheive that is for all of those professions to be present in the rural areas.  Considering doctors and architects as “urban” professions is a mistake.   We need rural doctors and teachers, and even better if they understand fundamental concepts of environmental sustainability to boot.

The students helped to assemble the "Aparato A" which is used to measure the slope and create the terraces. We donated the finished aparatus so they could continue the work the next semester.

 

Planting Two Dimensional Gardens

When two volunteers asked to come and work with SosteNica a few months ago, we and our partner organization saw an opportunity to shift the nature of our work in Nicaragua and focus on bringing some of the food security work from the rural area into the urban, and on education and capacity building rather than on lending.  Our volunteers helped design the project, and after visiting Estili, a city in northern Nicaragua known for its mural-covered walls, they proposed including designing and painting a mural as part of the project.  For the project, we partnered with the Norwalk-Nagarote Sister City Project, and they approved of the idea and chose a wall for us on their brand new community center.  The idea was for the mural to be a community activity, bringing the youth and kids from the families in the gardening project together to express the importance of gardening in another medium.  In the end, the mural became a much broader process, involving many people who were not part of the gardening project.

SosteNica volunteer Danya and the Sister City project field director Ramon gathered a group of local kids to start a brainstorming session.  They created drawings and wrote verses and their own reasons for gardening.  Danya used the drawings in her own design that formed the base for the mural.  Ramon suggested that the kids be given an opportunity to paint directly on the wall, and so nobody really know how it was going to turn out.  The design created environments – fields, patios, a river – and the kids filled the environments with plants and animals of their own design.  Danya painted a sketch version for us to follow, and we invited some of the older kids to help lay down the base design.

Juniette (above) and Junior, whose family is part of the Urban Gardening project and has built a very creative kitchen garden with raised beds lined with recycled plastic bottles, helped often.  When the “environments” were created, we organized a community painting day and invited all the kids from the Sister City project classes, the neighborhoods where we are helping to create kitchen gardens, and the neighborhood where the community center is.  We organized colors of paints, collected empty bottles and egg cartons, bought some refreshments, found some scrap paper, and braced ourselves for chaos.  And chaos it was!

The extra table for kids to practice their plant or animal, or just to keep them occupied while the wall was overcrowded was very helpful.  Needless to say, we had a few incidents of paint throwing, uninvited additions, and squabbling, but by the end of the afternoon the mural was definitely more lively.  We continued working over the next week with smaller groups, and fell into a good groove, adding some people and using the images the original group of kids had drawn to fill in the gaps.  The final design is rich and luscious, filled with life and creativity.  There is a sign in the middle for a very simple verse that one of the kids wrote at the beginning of the process: “we protect our plants because we depend on them for our food and our good health, thank you…”

You can read more about SosteNica’s work on their homepage.  Our volunteer, Danya, maintains her own site www.danyafrench.com with pictures and descriptions of her artwork and other community art projects.

 

Si nos quitan el pan!

In honor of World Food Day, October 16, an entry on one of the most important staples of culture and cuisine in the western hemisphere: corn. 

Anyone who attends a concert in Nicaragua, especially at a bar or hostel, is practically guaranteed to hear Luis Enrique Mejia Godoy’s popular song Los Hijos del Maiz (Children of Corn).  It’s hard to miss, although you may not understand all the lyrics very well because everyone in the room will be shouting them out full volume.  The song begins, “If they take away our bread (a direct referral to the 1980′s trade embargo) we will be obliged to live as our grandparents, with the fermented corn that runs through the blood of our ancestors”.  The song continues with a long list of food products derived from corn, many of which have odd indigenous names like perrerreque.  The complete lyrics can be found here, on the website of an excellent spanish school that takes its name from the song.

Although pan simple can be found in every corner shop in urban Nicaragua, corn remains a food staple, and the success of the annual corn harvest is highly important both for Nicaraguan diets and for the economy.  Although the majority of the corn is harvested dry for storage, the corn harvest actually last for months and begins with the harvest of chilote, or baby corns.  Baby corns are an essential part of all Nicaraguan soups, and are also the central ingredient in guiso de chilote, a side dish of creamed baby corns that accompanies meat dishes at the local comedors.  If you’re lucky, the chilote harvest coincides with first harvest of red beans, called frijol comagüe. The beans are harvested mature but not dried, and they cook quickly and are sweeter and creamier than the regular cooked dried beans.  They make a wonderful pair with sweet freshly steamed baby corn, and I can only imagine a campesino’s elation to eat this fresh dish after months of tortilla and heavy cooked dried beans.

The next stage of the corn harvest is elote.  It is understandable but actually a big mistake to think of elote as corn on the cob.  It is young dry corn, and so immensely tougher and starchier than the sweet corn varieties we plant in the US.  I had to learn to think of it as a completely different food before I could really enjoy it.  Elote is boiled or grilled, and the kernels can be shaved off the cob raw to be used to make atol, a thick sweet corn pudding, and guirilas, a kind of sweet grilled corn pancake cooked like a tortilla and eaten with cream and fresh cheese. The proper way to eat boiled elote is to carefully bite each kernel off whole and chew the rubbery sweet kernel, then suck the sweet juice out of the empty cob.  It’s a very enjoyable bus food, and when it is in season women carry buckets of steaming ears of corn up and down the bus routes.

After the elote harvest, the remaining corn in the field is left to dry.  The stalks are doubled over to protect the ears from rains and moisture, until the kernels are dry enough to be stored for months in sacks.  The food products derived from this dried corn are endless, from the three-times-a-day tortilla to indio viejo, a polenta-like dish with vegetables and meat, and cosa de horno, a sweet corn bread sold in busses and bus terminals.

The tortilla is the standard corn accompaniment to Nicaraguan dishes.  In the countryside, every meal is eaten with a tortilla, and they are rolled up with cheese inside or toasted for snacks, too.  It’s pretty easy to distinguish the flavor and texture of a tortilla made of real corn from one made of maseca, the pre-ground tortilla flour purchased at a super market.  The following pictures were taken in a village in Achuapa, where María makes 60 tortillas a day by hand for her large family.  The corn is first cooked with ashes from the fire, a process that can also be done with lime (calcium hydroxide).  The ash helps to split and remove the skins from the corn kernels and also helps our bodies absorb the vitamin B and calcium in the corn.  The best explanation for how this works is in the beginning of Michael Pollen’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  After the corn is cooked and washed, it is run through a hand mill, patted into tortillas (not pressed, like in Mexico), and toasted on a clay comal over a wood stove.  If you make the corn tortilla properly, it puffs up in the middle while it is toasting on its second side.

Possibly one of the most distinctive uses in Nicaragua for corn are the corn flour drinks – posol, pinol, pinolillo and tiste. Each of these variations begins with toasted corn – which is ground and then mixed with ground cacao, and/or cinnamon and sugar, and then with water or milk.  The corn and cacao flours don’t entirely dissolve, so people who drink these drinks are constantly swishing their glasses around to mix them up.  Inevitably the last few swallows are mouthfuls of sandy wet flour.  It takes a little getting used to.

Finally, after all the corn is harvested and eaten or stored, only the plants and cobs remain.  There are a few scattered projects promoting a way of making charcoal out of corn cobs, but the most cobs and left-over dried corn plant, called rastrojo, are shredded and fed to cattle or tilled back into the earth as organic matter. There are thousands of varieties of corn in Nicaragua – blue corn, white corn, yellow corn, and a dark golden orange corn.  Nearly everyone in every part of Nicaragua plants corn wherever they can.  It’s not uncommon to see houses along the highway surrounded with corn.  It is also one of the crops whose seed production remains in the hands of small producers here, and hopefully it will remain that way.

 

more remembering…

Thanks to a high school classmate of mine, a version of the entry I wrote below was posted on Turnstyle Youth Radio’s blog here and on the Huffington Post’s Green blog here.

Thanks Charlie!

 

 

Remembering Wangari Maathai

Wangari Muta Maathai (1940 – 2011) will be remembered and honored by millions of students, youth, environmentalists, professors and heads of state.  She demonstrated to the world that the eradication of poverty, the empowerment of women, and a sustainable future for our planet are fused in a single path to a just and peaceful world.  With her powerful vision and eloquent words, it’s no wonder she individually touched so many of us.  As they say here in Nicaragua to honor the life a heroine leaves behind, Wangari Maathai, Presente! 

Prof. Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, and has since mobilized hundreds of thousands of women and men to plant more than 47 million trees, restoring degraded environments and improving the quality of life for people in poverty.

Although I only met Wangari Maathai very briefly, her vision for creating social change through environmental stewardship and community organization has stayed with me for nearly a decade.

I helped to create a community garden in college, and with that innocent beginning became passionately involved in gardening and farming, eager to expand my knowledge and experience. So in 2002 I attended the winter conference for the Northeast Organic Farming Association.  The conference offered a smorgasbord of workshops and lectures, everything from plant pathology to how to douse for underground water sources.  Having recently declared cultural anthropology as my major, it was an easy choice for me to attend the lecture by a woman from Kenya who worked empowering rural women through reforestation.  For an hour, Wangari Maathai presented photographs and maps showing the achievements of the Green Belt Movement to a small group of Connecticut farmers, students, and environmental activists.

I can clearly recall the way she told her story with such optimism, humility, and confidence.  She related her years of tirelessly working to organize impoverished women and plant thousands of trees, transforming the landscape one hill at a time, in the manner one might use to tell someone what they cooked for dinner last night.  Her compelling argument transformed the struggle for equality and the fight for environmental stewardship into one and the same, instilling in all of us the importance of coming together across countries and cultures to work for a better world.

I remember approaching her afterward, completely enamored, and there and then asking whether it would be possible to come do my thesis in Kenya with her movement.  “Of course,” she told me without hesitation, “we have had wonderful students come work with us, of course you can.”  This is what I remember so clearly about hearing Wangari speak in person: she said yes unequivocally.  Yes, I have never met you but you can work with us.  Yes, rural African women have the strength and the power to reverse the damage of decades of deforestation.  Yes, we can bring peace to the world by planting trees. It’s that easy.

When the time came to begin researching for my thesis proposal, I began by contacting the organizers of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya.  As my plans came together, however, I decided I needed to work closer to home and use the lens of anthropology to reveal the intricacies of my own world rather than travel across the globe.  In the end my thesis explored the power of community gardens to transform an urban neighborhood in Connecticut, only blocks from my university.

When the Nobel committee awarded Wangari Maathai the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 I was thrilled, but also slightly remorseful for having passed up the opportunity to work with such a successful movement.   Over the years each time I have come across a reference to her and her work – honored by Forbes Magazine as one of the world’s 100 most powerful women, by Times Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, launching the Billion Tree Campaign, founding the Nobel Women’s Initiative and receiving countless awards – I am reminded of my past desire to go and learn from her.

My work with community gardening led me to organic farming, and my desire to work with social justice led me to learning Spanish and most recently has brought me here to Nicaragua.  Now I work with rural Nicaraguan families, coordinating a sustainable agriculture extension program and a reforestation project.  Together we plant trees into deforested cattle land, one hillside at a time.

And only now, as I sadly read her obituary nearly ten years later, it occurs to me that maybe I didn’t pass that opportunity up at all.

 

Alacrán? Check.

So, excuse the lag in posts to a very time-consuming but fun and exciting new Urban Gardening project in Nagarote – a post on that is promised soon!

Meanwhile, about a week ago one of my greatest fears since arriving in Nicaragua over 2 1/2 years ago came to pass.  I have seen several scorpions, alacranes, in various places here in León and out in the campo but have been lucky enough to avoid physicial contact.  In every previous encounter, there was a helpful calm Nicaraguan nearby who could chuckle at my alarm and even-paler chela face while calmly smushing the scorpion with a stick or a shoe.  In one instance I begged a ten-year old boy to help me, and he happily climbed up into the bunkbed in the room where I was staying and skillfully sliced the three-inch scorpion on the wall in two, saving me from a night of sleepless horror.

This time I was not so lucky.  Completely unknowingly I pulled a cardboard box out from under a deesk where it was stored and lept back as I felt a jolt so strong my whole arm felt electrocuted.  I thought for a minute I had hit an exposed electical cord, but the pain didn’t dissapate immediately like it does when you accidentally touch a charged wire.  There was absolutely no mark on my hand as evidence of the attack, but when my Nica friend Maria Jose who happened to be over at the time lifted the top of the cardboard box with a broomstick, there was the cowardly scorpion, under the top flap.  Meanwhile, my hand was pulsing.  The pain was definitely strongest in the tip of my middle finger, where the stinger must have struck me, but I could feel a fuzzy electric-like pain up into my elbow joint.

They are fierce looking!! The one in my box had a fatter flat dark body and tail, possibly a female waiting to mate or with eggs, according to Maria Jose.

I’ll admit I did not react very calmly.  I can only imagine what the neighbors thought as I stomped and yelled, alternately shaking my hand and squeezing my poor throbbing finger.  I called Nick, while Maria Jose rumaged around and found some pliers, and calmly disposed of the fat black scorpion.  She was justifiably quite proud of it too, and waved the oozing tail around to assure me that it was indeed conquered.

Nick mobilized the barrio, and in twenty minutes I had our doctor friend calling me with which antihistamine to buy, a friend on the way to a pharmacy, and two neighbors and a nurse they had found in the neighborhood arguing over whether that really was the right thing to give me.  Among other advise, I was told to chew on 7 basil leaves at once, eat little bits of dulce (unrefined brown sugar), drink strong sweet black coffee, run my hand under cold water, and suck on ice cubes.  I did all of the above.  Meanwhile, the pain was not residing, rather the fuzzy pins and needles feeling was spreading through my hand, and then my tongue starting tingling, and finally my teeth as well so that when I clenched by jaw I could feel vibrations through my teeth.  Luckily I never did feel like my throat started closing or have difficulty breathing, which is what our doctor said the next stage of the allergic reaction could be.

In typical Nica style, the  village in my house never really did agree, so I finally went with our doctor’s advice and the nurse injected me with an antihistamine, leaving me with two more to take orally the next day and some mildly offended neighbors whose advise to buy a different anti-allergen was not taken.  After the shot, the fuzzy pain didn’t go away but did stop spreading.  It started subsiding a few hours later, but it wasn’t until about 24 hours later that my hand and tongue fully stopped tingling.  In hindsght, maybe it wasn’t so bad, but I would like to check off scorpion sting from my list of Nicaraguan adventures and not go back to it again.  Like most wild animals, I know they don’t attack unless they feel threatened or disturbed, so I for one am much more cautious pulling out rarely-used books and boxes and putting on shoes.  So that’s why Nicas bang their shoes up-side down before putting them on…..

 

Breaking down Micro-Credit for Farmers

Doña Yamilette taking care of a calf whose mother she purchased with a loan, and who died giving birth. Yamilette is paying off the loan with help from her family, instead of from the intended milk sale from the cow.

As I hope is clear to all of us, micro-credit is not a panacea for ending poverty but an economic tool designed to be appropriate for small business and to help individuals with scarce resources jump-start their businesses or farms.  Or as the case may be in Nicaragua at the moment, if not help them grow than at least help keep small businesses and farms from folding in hard times.  When we read Muhammed Yunis or see the large glossy photo of a smiling farmer and his oxen from one of the large international micro-credit NGOs, it’s hard not to become enamored with the model.  However, as with business in general (and certainly with regards to any lending), responsibility and transparency are absolutely essential to high quality micro-lending, and should never be sacrificed for the charitable possibility of helping someone in need.  And by quality I mean two things – fiscally smart lending that leads to high recuperation rates, and lending in social and geographic sectors where financing for individuals is hard to find and necessary.

I recently sat down with a loan officer here and went through, step-by-step, the whole process of soliciting, approving, and managing an agricultural micro-loan here in Nicaragua.  Of course the process varies in other organizations and countries, but this gives one example of a micro-credit methodology that is thorough, transparent, and appropriate.

The requirements for applying for a micro-credit loan for ranching or farming is two years minimum experience with the relevant crop or livestock, and to not be already heavily indebted with the same or any other financial institution.  Within the last 5 years several credit-rating systems have been established in Nicaragua, which means “credit history” is a relatively new concept.  Instead of relying on honesty, credit institutions can now run background checks on any borrower to see, within a network of companies, other micro-credit institutions, and private banks, whether the solicitor has debts and what status they are in.

The cah-flow analysis filled out with the farmer also helps farmers to see their farm as a business instead of just a subsistence, and teaches good financial practices.

For farmers, the loan solicitation consists of two documents and an on-farm visit.  The first document is a study of the crop for which the loan is needed.  If the farmer wants a loan to plant sesame for example, a complete cash-flow analysis is devised, using information specific to the farmer for determining the cost of seed, fertilizer, labor, renting land, and selling.  If the cash-flow analysis predicts a profit, a sort of whole-farm business plan is created in order to ensure that the size of the loan is adequate for the farmer.  The other sources of income for a farm are sketched out, to ensure that there is are secondary forms of payment in the event of crop failure, and a farmer will not be left indebted with zero income.  The market prices and costs for items are cross referenced to make sure they are appropriate.  The lending institution I work with for example, keeps a reference document for each office that has an example of one loan from the previous year for every crop.  That document is referenced by every loan officer if they want to compare the time-frame or costs of a solicited loan.  Each office needs to keep it’s own updated reference document, because the cost of renting land, for example, could change drastically from one region to another.  Putting together the two analyses can take over three hours, and the on-farm visit may be over an hour away from the main office by motorcyle, which means that each loan solicitation is already an investment, both on the part of the farmer and the micro-credit institution.

Storing and skillfully marketing product are essential skills for any farmer in any part of the world.

If the analyses are approved by the institution, the farmer needs to provide the necessary legal information – photograph of his identification, proof of ownership of his animals and/or land, a co-signer, and a collateral for the loan.  Then his loan is fully approved and he can access the funding. But not all at once – agricultural loans tend to be larger and operate on longer time-frames than commercial loans.  And it’s not just unpredictable weather and markets that make agricultural loans risky; the long time-frames coupled with the every-day necessities of poorer families make it tempting to spend that money today instead of waiting it to spend on the farm later.  So agricultural loans are accessed in disbursements.  A crop that matures over three months for example, would be divided into the costs of activities by month.  The first month – plowing, ground prep, seeds and fertilizer.  The second month, labor for weeding or successive fertilizing, etc.  The third month, labor for harvesting and processing.

Each disbursement needs to be approved by a loan officer by a visit to the farm to see the status of the crop.  If there is no need for the disbursement, for example the crop is not a weedy as expected, has been destroyed by flooding, or maybe has never even been planted, the money is not given out even though the full loan was initially approved.  The disbursements are to the clear advantage of the farmer.  He only pays interest on the amount he has actually withdrawn, not the full approved amount.  And so if he never uses the part of the loan for hiring weeding labor because miraculously his sons arrive from out of town and do it for him, he just never takes it out and doesn’t pay interest on it either.

Another advantage for the farmer is a grace period after the anticipated harvest date during which he has no obligation to begin making payments.  Any money disbursed accumulates interest, but the grace-period functions as a kind of storage financing, relieving the farmer of some selling pressure and allowing him to wait for prices to go up if there is a glut on the market at the moment.

Ideally, agricultural micro-loan officers are farmers or agronomists themselves, and can provide borrowers with sound technical advice in addition to access to financing.

If the crop fails or the market falls drastically, the farmer may need to dip into his income from other activities on the farm, ask for help from his co-signer, or re-finance the loan to avoid the higher bad-debt interest rates.  Hopefully by this time, the farmer has developed a good rapport with the loan officer, who knows enough about the business to help the farmer figure out a payment plan that works for him.

After two years here, I can honestly say that I think providing quality micro-credit to individual business owners and farmers makes a difference in the world.  The numbers show it, and the testimonies back it.  But it’s not all feel-good helping the poor, and it’s certainly no excuse to make a profit or lend irresponsibly.  It’s a business that if it’s taken seriously by all involved from investor to lending institution to borrower, can really work.