1. Compost Piles

Nicaraguans burn their trash – plastic, organic, or otherwise.  Some of it gets picked up and taken to the dump, where it’s burned or buried.  But most of it is burned.  The heavy hot air in Leon is at any given point tinged with the smell of burn, something that I rejoicingly noticed the lack of the minute I stepped out of the car in New York.  Compost is an unknown concept – there is no real spanish word for it, the university calls it composta.  I don’t know anyone – not even the agro-ecology professor with a nursery where I lived for three months – who has a backyard compost.  Except for the hostel where I lived and Nick’s house, where I started them.   They are both working really well, and the heat in Leon helps them decompose so much more quickly than I am used to!

The scraps from the kitchen get mixed with dirt and dry leaves from the patio. It composts rapidly in the Leon heat!

Two days after planting the young banana tree with pounds of my compost, the core started emerging rapidly. It's now about five feet tall with four large green glossy leaves.

2. A group of inspiring hard-working Micro Credit professionals.

I am so grateful to CEPRODEL for making the internship with them work.  They went above and beyond what I expected all the time, up to the last minute when they made me a little booklet with a report of my project with them and took me out to a festive dinner at one of my favorite restaurants.  Many of these guys travel three hours one way to work, and spend over 12 hours a day away from their families in order to do their work.

The group of CEPRODEL officers that took me out to dinner. The dinner helped me realize that many parts of my project were a challenge for different reasons, for example, not only speaking a new language and coming from a different background but also being the only female in a very male work environment.

3. Puestos para Plantas

An excellent project run by a British NGO mimicking Paul Farmer’s Village Health Network model and using it to create a Plant Health Network.  The project uses already existing avenues of resources to small farmers, such as cooperatives and university extensions, to create a national system of data collection and standardized advice for farmers.  The system uses an approach called MIC, or Integrated Cultivation Management.  MIC emphasizes  improved cultural practices like good weed management and soil fertility that play a large role in preventing the onslaught of diseases and the need to use chemical applications.  In Nicaragua, the project is part of a national campaign to reduce pesticide dependency.

Tecnicos from the Cooperative Juan Francisco Paz Silva with representatives from the British NGO CABI and UNAN Leon Agroecology.

4. The worlds most handsome and intelligent kitten, Theo

He can climb in and out of the house windows, he gets out of the house using the storm drain, and happily plays with and eats the cockroaches out of the bathroom.  No cat doors, minimal effort on our part, and a huge return for having a happy purring sometimes snuggly mouse eater in the house.

Theo also provides endless entertainment for all our guests, as my little friends Ale and Fabricio demonstrate.

There are alot of differences between our meal Monday night in Sutiava, Leon and Thanksgiving.  Supposedly the first Thanksgiving was a welcome to the arrival of the pilgrims from Europe to the new land, my dinner was a farewell after ten months of living in Nicaragua.  The original Thanksgiving might have had pigs feet and chicken tacos served as well, but if it did that part of the story was lost in history.  Our cranberry sauce didn’t have any cranberries in it, but we ate turkey.

My friend Melaña came three hours from a little village outside of Achuapa for the dinner. She seems like quiet shy person, but always seems to show up at the best parties!

Ceremoniously taking the turkey out of the oven - along with the supermarket chicken we bought after we saw how skinny the turkey was.

The turkey was clothed in bacon, a good decision since it didn't actually release much juice while it cooked.

There ended up being a nice variety of traditional Nicaraguan, American Thanksgiving, and English Sunday Dinner dishes.  The chompipe was a big hit and appropriately there was lots of recipe swapping happening during dinner.  There was a nice selection of people who I know from CEPRODEL, UNAN Leon, the Olla Quemada, and of course Melana from Achuapa.  Any excuse to eat good food brings folks together.

Sadly I have no valient and gory photographs of the great Chompipe slaughter, because Mama Lily, the nice little lady who agreed to babysit our chompipe got up early and slaughtered it literally while I was at my house on the phone with my mom confirming some turkey details from the joy of cooking.  When we arrived, knives and details for boiling water all worked out, the bird was in in a pot and in the fridge.  And all without letting us know.  At least she didn’t cook it for us too!  So we just got on with our day, went to market, and celebrated a birthday party.  Making pumpking pie tonight to get everything ready for a nica thanksgiving tomorrow.

The man who sharpened our knives had a shop full of interesting trinkets made from old tin cans and aluminum.

black beans at the market

Carola (in the center with the sideways face) is the owner of the Olla Quemada, my favorite Leon bar, where I go salsa dancing every week.

Among the lofty goals of mine to accomplish before I leave in 4 days (!!!) is to host a Thanksgiving-ish dinner with friends.  So, because we like leading a simple life without too many complications, Nick and I took an extra two hours out of yesterday to head on muddy paths 8 km beyond the city of Nagarote in search of a turkey.  We miraculously reached the farm of William Gutierrez, participant in the CEPRODEL Reforestation project, without taking any wrong turns and without getting stuck in the mud.

Williams kids ran around the yard and grabbed the turkeys (chompipes) that were big enough to kill.

I compared the weight of a two different turkeys and selected the bigger one.  Jennifer, the youngest child of the farmer william, was very intrigued by the birds.  She was a bit upset once she saw the turkey in the back of our truck and realised that it was coming with us.

This the view of the volcano Momotombo from the main road that passes Nagarote.  I’ve been wanting to take this picture for several weeks now, as the sorghum has been slowly ripening and deepening in color.

Next post:  This afternoons task of killing the Chompipe.

The fertility of the soil is apparently excellent; the house where we had lunch was surrounded by hydrangas bigger than my head.

Saturday we went for a tour of the coffee production and social development projects with the UCA Miraflor, a cooperative of 45 producers.  The UCA is also an eco-tourism project, which helps members build cabins or improve the conditions of their house to have a room to rent to tourists.  Some of my friends from the states who stayed with a family for a few nights said it was one of the best things they did here.

Marlon shows off a variety of lemon that is also nearly the size of my head. The producer received a mess of trees from a project and mostly gives them away - social capital.

The purpose of our trip was mostly to look at their coffee production and see how it could be improved.  Miraflor is a national reserve, filled with an amazing diversity of wildlife and plants.  Chico, the Manager of the coffee production, is at heart an avid bird watcher and even though it rained all day and he didn’t have any raingear, he chose to stay on the back of the pickup with his binoculars, banging frantically on the roof so we could stop and get out whenever he saw an exciting specimen.  Marlon, one of the tecnics, also came with us, and Carlos, the president of the cooperative, joined us at the cupping lab and for lunch.

Miraflor was rainy, damp, and by the end of the day the coldest I have been in Nicaragua.  At lunch I could see my breath for the first time in nearly ten months.  Spanish moss dripping from trees and buildings gave the gray day and even gloomier mystical feeling.   Every tree carried more than its load of epiphytes and orchids in addition to the spanish moss.  The farms we visited were impressively diverse as well, with coffee, bananas, plantains, citrus trees, chayote squash, cattle, and extensive patio vegetable gardens that are promoted by one of the UCA projects for food sovereignty and nutrition.

Fince Fuente la Vida where we had a delicious lunch and I got to hover over the fire in the kitchen with the women serving food.

The big achievement of the day was discussing and agreeing to produce a trial batch of ten sacks of ‘naturally dried’ coffee.

Chico in the cupping lab where we sampled Miraflor organic coffee.

Most of the coffee in Nicaragua is fermented and washed at a ‘wet beneficio’ to remove the fruit from around the coffee bean, and then the bean is dried at a ‘dry beneficio’ before being exported as green coffee.  Naturally dried coffee, which is actually an older method of producing coffee, dries the whole coffee cherry like a raisin, and after about 12 days when it is good and dry the fruit is then removed from the bean by pounding it.  There is a difference in the finished product, because the bean absorbs a different flavor from the fruit when they are dried together.  Recently Mickey from Salt Spring coffee in Canada expressed interest in purchasing naturally dried coffee for using in expressos, opening up a new export market for a product generally considered lower quality.

Dolores, one of the women who have a new 'fogon' with a chimney and flu. She is stripping wild grapes that her family had just harvested. Small as wild blueberries and delicious. Even the cat likes the new stove setup.

The UCA has also has a myriad of social and environmental projects in addition to the vegetable gardens.  They have installed solar panels, build improved stoves that burn less wood and have chimney and flu systems to keep houses free of smoke, funded coffee plantation renovations, build schools, and are in the process of building small improved ‘wet beneficios’ with an improved water filtration system to reduce contamination at individual farms.  At the end of the day it was so cold and we were so wet it was hard to absorb so much interesting and positive information.  Their list of activities kept going on and on, and when we thought we had gotten them all notated they would casually mention something else that sparked our interest.  Luckily the city of Estili is a close half hour drive, and the muddy rough roads not so bad at all.   This is an excellent part about dealing with sometimes rough travelling conditions here: if I’d never left Leon this year I never would have thought a hot shower in Nicaragua would be so delicious.

Adolfo Mareno Guttierez, a coffee producer who just received a new beneficio which will conserve water and reduce the contamination normally produced by wet processing coffee. Every farmer had several varieties of coffee. Adolfo had one that is yellow instead of red when ripe; which I had never seen before.

Three of Santiago Sabino's eight children pose with him in the well-tended plantain, fruit, and watermelon plot.

Last week while I was visiting some of the participants in the reforestation project I found another clever companion-planting combination. Don Santiago Sabino lives about 8 kilometers off the main road, down a dirt road that turned into a mud pit after only one rainfall the night before. We nearly didn’t make it there with the motorcycle. Santiago has planted his citrus and plantain trees en asocio, putting two plantain trees in between each citrus. While the citrus trees are small he can use the same irrigation system for both plants, and the plantain trees will help ‘hide’ the citrus trees from white moths, the citrus’ main pest.

Trying to get the motorcycle through a muddy river. I walked more than half of the 6 kilometers back because the extra weight on the back of the motorcycle made the back wheel spin in the mud.

Not all the participants in the project have irrigation, but Santiago has a pump set up in the river nearby, and has a gravitational irrigation system, where he has dug trenches that run alongside of the rows of plants. The water is pumped up from the river and then runs down the hill in the trenches, watering the trees. Underneath each plantain tree is a sprouting pipian or watermelon plant. Santiago figured that he planting the seeds at the base of the plantain tree will take advantage of the same water and fertilizer, and the sale of the watermelon and pipian will pay for the gas he needs to run the pump and operate the irrigation. Santiago has a farm of 60 manzanas that he has bought bit by bit over the years. He has about 20 cattle right now, but also has years of vegetable experience, which helped him to figure out this clever way of paying for his irrigation. He has one of the most diverse farms I’ve seen here, with fruit trees surrounding his house and a large garden with peppers, tomatoes, papaya, and more watermelon. CEPRODEL selected his farm to trial cocoa plants and see whether they produce well in that zone. He is still figuring out a good spot and system for planting the cocoa in partial shade.

Santiago's youngest son shows the small watermelon seedlings just sprouting underneath the plantain tree.

A more well established Pipian squash plant growing at the base of a mango sapling. The gravitational irrigation system Santiago dug (trenches going downhill with a pump to fill them) ensures that the plants receive plenty of water.

The rainy season, which took a long break in the middle and frustrated many farmers, is making the most of October. We´ve had steady rains a couple times a week in the late afternoons, which means gorgeous afternoon light in the city.

There´s alot going on right now.  I´m trying to tie up a bunch of loose ends before I leave to go back to the states in two weeks  (marking the end of my ten month Fulbright).  Some of those are work related, some are just small things like making an effort to go to those museums and restaurants I´ve walked past for ten months and always thought, I´ll go there soon, but haven´t ever made it.  Even though I´m coming back in December, it´s nice to have this mental deadline to give myself a push and be extra productive and thoughtful about how I spend my time.

Last Thursday my friend Sterling Vasquez, the director of a contemporary and folk dance company, invited me to dance some Irish reels at his 15th anniversary show at the municipal theater here in León.  I somehow managed to get a nice costume together at the last minute.  It certainly wasn´t what I used to dance, but it felt good to spend a week remembering some old material, making up some new things, and generally stretching and getting into shape.  I enjoy representing that part of my culture and past here.  Nicaraguans understand the importance of traditional music and arts, and are incredibly receptive when you offer to share yours.  There was a Fulbright snapshot moment backstage with me in my Riverdance-esque black and all the little girls in their long satin traditional Nicaraguan dresses, each exclaiming over the elegance of each others dresses and dances.

Yamilette, one of the participants from Las Limas, tries her hand at grafting a lemon sapling.

Friday was a workshop at the reforestation project.  Eighteen of the participants came.  There were two main themes: establishing tree nurseries and grafting; and fitopathology, or diagnosing and treating plant diseases.  We had a practical excercise where anyone interested was invited to try grafting a tree.  Afterward we held a general questions and answers session, which successfully turned into a very useful discussion about what the next stages of the project will be and how we can help limit the damage of the impending six month drought.  After the discussion ended, Luis and Vernonn completely surprised me by presenting me with a certificate of appreciation for spending my grant working with their project.   It was a really sweet gesture, a beautifully designed certificate, and

gave me an excellent opportunity to  in turn thank all the farmers for being so welcoming to me at their farms.  I ended by asking them all for two things: that they always be open and trusting in expressing their opinions of the project with us, and that they take enjoyment in the process of designing and diversifying their land.

It took us a full forty-five minutes to pick up a truckload of friends and family. I took this picture at about 1:30 am as we were getting ready to repeat the forty-five minute return loop. Javi and Anna are in front.

Last week was Javier´s birthday.  Javier is a friend and young biology professor who is working in the mangrove forests along the coast at my favorite León beach, Las Piñitas.  The traditional birthday song here starts ´En las Mañanitas´ (In the early morning).  A birthday celebrants family should wake them up very early in the morning with gifts.  Realistically I´m not sure how often that actually happens, as nearly all the birthday celebrations I´ve been to have been pretty late night raucous affairs.  But Javi had plans to go to Granada with his girlfriend Anna and so wouldn´t be around to party in the evening.  So at midnight the night before we rounded up a crew and, with some scheming with Anna, managed to sneak into his house and wake him up at 12:30 am on his birthday.  According to the song, a very properly celebrated Nica birthday.

A client in Telica takes advantage of the soil fertility in a eucalyptus patch to plant pumpkins.

I’ve seen some creative garden designs among the CEPRODEL clients I’ve visited.  One of the gardening methods that few larger farms adopt for scale reasons is companion planting, or mixing two or more species of plants in the same space to take advantage of different needs or services of each plant.  A well-known example of companion planting in the states is the three-sisters garden, of corn beans and squash.  I’ve seen many variations on that theme here.

Juana de la Rosa Sanchez Chevez and  Miguel Angel Ruiz Lopez, clients in Telica, are innovating with new vegetable gardening methods.   Miguel Angel’s farm is an example of how vegetable farming can be profitable with little land, although he admits that it is more labor intensive than the cattle farming that most farmers here focus on.  His two acres in the town of Quetzalguaque is currently planted in pipian and ayote (two kinds of squash), cucumbers, sesame, sweet corn, and string beans.  He has an intense rotation system.

Miguel Angel's row of sesame planted along side of his cucumber, which will climb a trellis. Climbing a trellis results in cucumbers that are green on all sides (instead of yellow where they rest on the ground), and also helps keep them free of bacterial and fungal soil diseases.

The season here is non-stop, because with a drip irrigation system he can grow year-round, and so he plants beans in rotation to allow the land to regenerate a bit.  Unlike corn and squash, beans fix nitrogen in the soil and aren’t heavy feeders.   We talked for over an hour about his garden, the different problems he’s encountered, and how his gardening methods have changed since he started.  Some of his new experiments are,

-  Using old drip tape for his cucumber trellises.  The drip tape that has broken in smaller sections he can tie together.  The test will be if it is strong enough to support the full-grown plants.

- Planting sesame as a repellent for comegenes, a grub that attacks the roots of crops.  He heard that sesame exudes a bitter oil from its roots that soil grubs don’t like.

- Planting a mixture of ayote (kind of like pumpkin) and pipian (kind of like zucchini, but the plant grows more like a cucumber plant) between his rows of corn just as the corn is beginning to form fruit.  The live corn plants protect

Raphael, one of the CEPRODEL rural credit supervisors in Telica, looking at the pipian.

the curcubit seedlings with a bit of shade, and then he lets the corn plants dry to harvest for tortilla corn and the squash plants take over.  The pipian is harvested first, and the ayote second.  He usually harvests the pumpkin green and small, to sell for putting in soup.  But this year the price has dropped for ayote tierno, and so he is going to let them get big and riper to sell during the christmas season when people make candied pumpkin with dulce, an unrefined brown sugar.

Miguel Angel Ruiz Lopez y Juana de la Rosa Sanchez Chevez

Francisco Novoa, one of the farmers participating in the project, with his citrus and plantain trees.

Friday we had a meeting with the CEPRODEL clients in the reforestation project .   We organized a presentation by INAFOR, the National Institution of Forestry, about the process of registering conservation land and legally harvesting precious wood.   Because we included in the project valuable lumber with the goal of giving the participants a potential long-term income (most lumber trees take 20 years to mature to a prifitably size), we felt it was important for them to understand the process of legally harvesting and selling lumber.

The representative of INAFOR talked about the benefits of registering forests, and that just since August 2008 INAFOR has made a new policy that invites small producers to register plots under 20 manzanas for just $5 US.  Previously they had charged $28 US and only accepted plots larger than 20 manzanas.  When a plot is registered, INAFOR offers services such as free seedlings to reforest, disease and pest support.   He talked about the need to reforest and conserve forested areas – how many manzanas dissappear each year to firewood and logging, and how that puts water sources and ecosystems in danger.  There are also certain types of trees that are illegal to cut and sell without special permission from INAFOR.   As a reforestation project, it might seem a bit odd to be devoting time to talking about cutting down trees.  I think the idea was for the participants in the project to become familiar with the legal processes of benefiting financially from their trees, as well as the fines involved in mishandling forest exploitation.

Abrahan Escoto Juarez talking to the group.

Toward the end of the presentation one of the participants, Don Abrahan, expressed his concern about who was NOT getting this information.  “We are small farmers who do not have to resources to cut down lots of trees, or the connections to sell them, and most of us have very little land to profit off of.  But near my house there is a large farmer who has tractors and chain saws, and he has cleared many manzanas of land.  Some of the trees that he has cut down are on the other side of the river that borders our land, and that puts my water at risk.  Are you talking to him and the other large farmers that have machinary too?  I think they need to hear this information more than we do.

If every small farmer clears a little bit of land it all adds up to a big area, which is the danger in thinking that your little bit doesn’t matter.  It’s a good justification for continuing a bad practice, like continuing to use an herbicide because it’s only a few little acres, or people in the states continuing to drive short distances instead of biking or walking.  It’s such a little piece of land, or such a short distance, it can’t really matter.  It’s also a dangerous way of justifying NOT changing, by thinking that a good thing in such little bit also can’t make that much of a distance.  But it’s hard not to see Abrahan’s point.  The difference is that we can see when big “evil” farmers or companies clear cut, but it’s alot harder to see the cumulative impact of lots of small individuals.

I think Abrahans point came partially from a feeling that because there are so many projects here focussing on small farmers, organizing the poor into groups and educating them on different social and environmental topics, that those outreach groups are missing a part of the population that continue to practice – and profit from – things that the small poor are encouraged not to do – such as exploit large acres of forest or spray chemicals on acres of irrigated corn.

The representative answered that there is a system to fine people who harvest unregistered lumber within a close distance of a river, and invited Don Abrahan to come to his office and file a complaint.  I wonder if he will follow through, and how much of his question was based on a general resentment about having a neighbor with chain saws and tractors.

I visited twos SosteNica clients in El Sauce last week with Franklin, the departmental director for CEPRODEL in León.

Don Orlando herds dairy cattle in one of his corrals. This year his cash crops are beef, milk, and sesame, and he grows corn for subsistence along with all the pasture for his cattle.

The first, Don Orlando, had taken a $10,000 loan out to buy cattle.  At the time that he bought the calves, the price was 27 cordoba, or roughly $1.35, a pound.  That was over a year ago.  According to the plan he initially worked out, he should have paid his load back by this August, but the price has dropped to 16 cordoba a pound, or $0.80, and he chose not to sell.  Instead, he re-worked his plan with CEPRODEL to lengthen the time frame, or plazo, of his loan.  We visited his farm to see his herd, brand some dairy cattle that he chose to designate as collateral, and see the 30 acres of sesame that he is planning to use to pay back half his loan after he harvests it in mid-November.

Don Orlando has over 400 acres, spread over two different farms that he has inherited or bought.  He is a conventional farmer who manages his land and cattle well.  He has the luxury of having enough land to rotate his cattle and crops frequently, a practice that is important for the soil fertility as well as keeping diseases and pests to a minimum.  He has almost thirty acres of pasto de corto, usually a variety sugar cane or tall grass that grows over six feet tall during the rainy winter and then is used as cattle feed in the dry summer months.  The new header image at the top of this site is a view of one of Don Orlando’s pastures and cattle.  He and his employees as use horses to herd that cattle into corrals, where there are water basins and mineral salts.  It was clear from the healthy appearance of the cattle that he is a responsible cattle farmer.

Horseback is the best way to get around these vast farms, often connected with very poorly maintained dirt roads. Even in the drought (read: lack of mud), we nearly got the CEPRODEL truck stuck on several ruts and uneven parts of the rural roads.

His thirty acres of sesame were even more impressive.  In the past several years he has only dedicated five manzanas to planting a cash crop, either sesame or watermelon.  This year he chose to plant a 26 manzana section that has been cattle pasture for 20 years.  The 20 year rest out of the agricultural rotation, which is called giving a land descanso, allowed the land to absorb all the fertility from the cattle manure and natural decomposition.  This year Don Orlando says he expects the best sesame harvests he has ever had, despite the fact that other farmers complain that the drought has affected their yields.   His sesame is impressive, over six feet tall and very productive.

This is a difficult time for many farmers.  The drought, which is negatively affecting predicted yields for staple and export crops, will possibly also raise some of the market values of those crops but probably not enough to make up the difference in yields.  Many farmers in this part of Nicaragua have been relying more and more heavily on cattle, and the sudden swell in production has cut the market price by half in the past year.  This highlights one of the risks of agricultural loans, because the market price of agricultural products – cattle included – fluctuate quickly.  Because of the length of time necessary to cultivate a grain or raise cattle, loans are taken out based on market prices that may be over a year before the product will actually be sold.  It’s a gamble.  And sometimes farmers need to pay back cattle loans with a sesame harvest, which doesn’t make it clear at the end of the day whether the farmer has actually gotten ahead.  Was it worth it to Don Orlando to take out a  loan for cattle which he can’t pay back with the sale of the cattle and has to dip into his sesame income to clear?  As a responsible farmer, who clearly has a high quality product to offer, he thinks it was.  By renegotiating his loan with CEPRODEL, he has avoided needing to turn over all his collateral (double the value of his loan) and keeps his credit history intact, ensuring the possibility of future credit.  With the credit he nearly doubled the size of his herd, and while he is not sending all of the intended cattle to slaughter, he has also increased the number of his dairy cattle.  The price of milk has remained more stable than beef, and his better-than-average pasture management means that he will probably maintain good milk yields through the summer, when the price of milk goes up slightly.  So even though he will pay more in interest than originally planned by extending the length of his loan by a year, his responsible farm and credit management has at least maintained the long term growth of his farm.  For many farmers here, whether they have taken credit out in the past year or not, the slow economy and drought has made it a challenge to maintain their businesses, let alone come out ahead.

The rural credit supervisor and technical assistant for CEPRODEL, Sebastian, branding the dairy cattle for collateral. He is using acid, a safer, quicker, and more humane method of branding than using a hot iron brand.