Yesterday, I visited a number of families and walked through their
small subsistence farmsteads. At one farmstead, a young man in his early 20’s had a caged animal I had never seen before. It was like a cross between a large rabbit and a monkey. He took it out of the tiny cage to show me. I thought it might bite, but instead the poor thing began licking his captor’s hand. The young man gave his pet a banana and it picked it up with its hands and ate it like a small child would have.
He said he’d found it when it was quite small about three months ago, and that this creature could grow to the size of a medium-sized dog. They often harm the crops, especially yucca, as staple food for the family. They live up in the mountainside forests. This type of creature is also a source of food for the family. During our visit, they also showed us the handicrafts they weave out of natural materials.
Today, another family had
a tiny monkey in an even tinier cage.
It had been causing mischief, so they were punishing it in the cage I
think, or at least trying to keep it out of trouble.  It was making a huge scene. I felt bad for it and worried that they never let it out, so I gave it a piece of ginger to eat, it was the only thing I had in my bag. Thankfully, later they did let it out to
jump around freely in the trees.
We were there collecting the fruit and vegetables these families
had grown through the SHI program.
The SHI truck and staff were carrying it all down the mountainside (the roads are atrocious and none of the farmers have their own vehicles). SHI has set up a system to help them sell their crops directly to customers in the city via a subscription service somewhat like a CSA.
Today we were measuring the nutrition content of the
citrus fruits they are growing, a Brix chart and hand-held refractometer is the tool we use, it helps us determine the
quality of their soils. We are hoping our study will help them figure out how to improve the soils which are very poor and compacted in this area. When the soil is fertile and nutrient rich, the food that grows out of it is more nutritious.
It’s been fun, like a wine tasting of tangerines, oranges and grapefruits. The farmers got really excited about it. I know that probably sounds strange, but I guess when you don’t have tv, or roads with cars, you get excited about the little things in life-like how sweet and full of vitamins
you can make your grapefruits.
The kids were very eager to learn about the soils and helped identify the soil color and texture while the parents dug soil test pits, samples from which will be sent to the local university lab for nutrient and carbon analysis.
All the farming they do is organic due to the high costs of chemical amendments. Their traditional cropping methods often involve a system where they burn down forest to add fertility which gets used up in the first couple of years. By switching to this biointensive method, they learn how to use locally available materials to create composts and natural fertilizers to grow productively on smaller parcels of land, rather than the shifting cultivation.
One of their biggest problem is lack of irrigation. Climate change has already increased their dry season from three months to six months out of every year. Without a way to provide water to their crops during the dry season, they are unable to produce very much outside of the rainy season which begins in June. Interplantings of fruit trees and leguminous hedge rows helps them expand their earnings. Some have fish ponds where they grow tilapia. Others have pens with ducks or swine. One woman even had several pens where she raises over 100 Iguanas – another favorite food in this area.
March 9, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Hi-
Interesting essay. Glad to see you are putting the refractometer to use.
I’d like to invite you to check out some essays on Brix at my blog, TheNewAgriculture.
Here’s a link to the first one:
http://thenewagriculture.blogspot.com/2009/11/part-i-problem.html
Part IV is an invitation to join the High Brix Project, where we are working on correlating soil minerals, Brix, and nutrient content of crops.
Also you might like this web site, lots of free info on soil minerals:
http//www.soilminerals.com
Keep up the good work!
Michael Astera
March 13, 2010 at 3:33 pm
Thanks, I really appreciate the information. I will definitely check those sites out.
March 10, 2010 at 5:24 am
Hey,
Great post. I work in parts of northern panama and in southern costa rica. Those red hard clays are a bit tuff to deal with as you are seeing. You need to find them a calcium supply, hopefully both carbonate and sulfate forms. In San Isidro de General in southern costa rica, Del Monte produces excellent quality pineapples, getting relatively good brix. We did calcium carbonate trials all the way up to 10 tons/ha on the MD2 pineapples. To this day, they still apply 10 per hectare on their fields, every time they plant…
Mixing the calcium with the organic material makes very small quantities go much further as calcium is translocatable in the roots of a plant, meaning roots receiving calcium can move the calcium to other roots that do no have good calcium concentrations. So putting in several concentrated calcium ribbons or handfulls, buried, makes huge difference.
Rock phosphate is also one that would help dramatically on their crops, however, is hard to get in that part of the world. Manures tend to concentrate phosphorus, so any additions of manure to the organic material will show great response provided the calcium is there in sufficient quantities….
Good Luck!
Michael K.
March 13, 2010 at 3:34 pm
Thanks Michael,
Very helpful. We will try that and see what happens with the brix. The farmers were so excited about it and really wanted to know what they could do to raise the numbers. Someone else recommended Epsom salt as well.
March 13, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Epsom salt is fine, if the crop needs magnesium and sulfur. If it doesn’t need them, one is either wasting the amendment or harming the crop or soil.
I was looking at some soil tests from a coffee orchard in Zambia yesterday; acid soil pH 4-5, naturally high Mg and very high S. They surely don’t need Epsom salts there.
Getting the soil tested and learning to interpret it is the only way to do it right. Anything else is guesswork.
Michael A
March 14, 2010 at 3:56 pm
Yes, definitely. We are sending soils tests to the lab in Chiriqui now. Do you have any experience with the local University labs in Panama? We heard that was the one to use. Really the difficulty is going to be getting any ammendments to these farmsteads. There are no real roads, the farmers would have to carry the ammendments a long way up steep paths to get them to their croplands and don’t really have the funds to do that, so we are trying to find the best locally available solutions. One idea that has come up is trying to get them to leave more of a covering of the dead litter materials and incorporate that into the soils to boost the organic matter in the soil, right now they seem to compost it or just push it out of their gardens.
Thanks again for your suggestions, they are much appreciated.
March 14, 2010 at 4:28 pm
Increasing the soil organic matter content is generally a good idea. What it won’t do is add anything that is missing from the parent soil.
When you get your test results back, send them to me at soiltests@soilminerals.com and I’ll give them a look.
I agree local sourcing is best. I don’t know the geology of your area, but limestone outcroppings are common enough if you need Calcium. Are there any bat caves in the area for guano? How far are you from the ocean if you need seaweed?