Rutgers Professor Works with Guyanese Small-Scale Shadehouse Farmers

Rutgers University's Office of Communications recently published an article about Farmer to Farmer volunteer Robin Brumfield. A specialist in farm management, with 35 years of experience in greenhouse production and management, Brumfield is an educator of small farmers as well as professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. "Rutgers Professor Returns to South America to Train Small-Scale Shadehouse Farmers" explains how Brumfield's work in Guyana was focused on hydroponics and shadehouse vegetable production, also with emphasis on product marketing. “What stood out for me was the sacrifice that so many of the small farmers had to make to produce their crops and get them to the market, especially those in the remote areas,” said Brumfield. “Their interest in learning all they can to make their small-scale operation profitable was well worth my trip and I was grateful to the Farmer to Farmer program for allowing me to share my expertise.” Brumfield will return to Guyana for two weeks this summer to further assist small farmers with their businesses.

This photo was provided by the Office of Communications at Rutgers University. Robin Brumfield, center, pictured with Lilawatie "Anna" Bridglall, a shadehouse vegetable producer, and Mike Harker, a former Peace Corp volunteer and visiting business management consultant with the Farmer to Farmer project.

The article can be found here:
http://sebsnjaesnews.rutgers.edu/2013/05/rutgers-professor-returns-to-south-america-to-train-small-scale-shadehouse-farmers/?pid=61#ngg-imagebrowser-8-4409

Introducing Vegetable Grafting to Small-Scale Farmers in Nicaragua

Carol Miles and Patti Kreider recently completed a vegetable grafting assignment in Nicaragua.  Carol Miles is a vegetable horticulture professor at Washington State University's Northwest Washington Research & Extension Center. Carol and Patti provided technical training to small-scale growers and agricultural trainers on the basics of grafting tomato, pepper and watermelon with the goal being to overcome vegetable production constraints, such as soil borne diseases and increase vegetable yield and quality.

Patti Kreider and Carol Miles with the Asociacion Trabajadores del Campo in Mayas, Nicaragua

The team provided written materials, lectures, discussions, hands-on training and supplies for tomato and pepper splice and cleft grafting at 7 locations to a total of 88 trainees, along with trainings for cucurbit (i.e. watermelons, cucumbers) grafting at 2 locations.  The printed materials used by Dr. Miles for the trainings on vegetable grafting were translated by the F2F field staff in Nicaragua, they hope to have these technical resources published by Washington State University and making them available online to download for free. 

Patti & Carol provided hands-on grafting training with predesigned seedlings

Even though almost all training participants had never heard of vegetable grafting prior to their training events, Carol and Patti, shared that "all participants appeared to be interested and enthusiastic about the potential usefulness of this technique given their production limitations, particularly soil-borne diseases. This attitude on their part was greatly influenced by their very positive experience with the use of grafting for tree fruit production."  The team built on this positive experience to introduce vegetable grafting, the advantages of this new practice and how it can be used effectively.  Carol and Patti also noted how impressed they were with the many woman that walked quite a long distance to attend one of their trainings in Esquipulas, some had walked 2 hours.  This showed the strong interest in learning and a desire for new practices that could help many of these single mothers find a way to improve their production, feed their families and have left over crop to sell.

Patti & Carol with Women's group in Esquipulas

The Farmer to Farmer field office was also asked to have Carol and Patti train Peace Corps Volunteers on vegetable grafting.  Carol is a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Peace Corps-Cameroon), and began the training by discussing her career path from undergraduate student, to a Peace Corps Volunteer to associate professor at Washington State University.  She provided background information on the development of vegetable grafting worldwide, hands-on vegetable grafting demonstration and extensive questions and answers regarding rootstocks and also exploring ways to use locally available resources.  Patti and Carol noted that the trainees appeared to be very enthusiastic about the potential of utilizing vegetable grafting in their assignments and disseminating this new information to the farmers in their assigned communities.

Patti with Peace Corps Volunteers in Selva Negra

Top Bar Beekeeping in Jamaica: A Personal Account by F2F Volunteer, Jessie Brown

I've been back Stateside for a few days after spending 2 weeks traveling through Jamaica teaching Top Bar Hive Beekeeping, Treatment Free Beekeeping, Queen Rearing and Beeswax Products through the Partners of the America's Farmer to Farmer Program.

Top bar model apiary at Yerba Buena Farm in St. Mary

In a nutshell, I taught 152 beekeepers on Top Bar Hives and Sustainable Beekeeping from one end of Jamaica to the other, in Kingston, Westmoreland, Bartons, St. Thomas, St. Mary and Portland.

Jamaica has banned the importation of beeswax to the country, so they can't make enough beeswax to support the foundation needed for Langstroth hives. Each apiary is suggested to have 10% Top Bar hives, solely for wax production, but nobody knows how to use this style of hive yet! I was there continuing the education of previous trainers, New Mexico's own Les Crowder and Megan Mahoney! Tom Hebert from Honduras has also participated in the program.

Jessie's Top 9 Teaching List:

1. Top Bar Beekeeping is Awesome
By the time I had given my 45-minute demo about how awesome Top Bar Beekeeping is, people were pulling out their measuring tapes to find out dimensions and make their own hives. The benefits of these hives are huge to this country:
• Cheap, hives can even be made out of woven bamboo, burlap coffee bags or bundled straw to cut costs even further
• More beeswax production to make Langstroth foundation or start producing beeswax products.
• No hidden places for Hive Beetles to make a home
• No equipment storage
• No extra parts, no extractors, or frames, or foundation or boxes, or queen excluders
• Lightweight - anybody can lift a 10 pound comb
                                            


Grafting Queens - Portland

Bee Farmers Association

2. Queen Rearing
The idea of rearing queens that are resistant to disease and pathogens is rocking their world! Every queen rearing talk would lead to people telling me about their new treatment for mites. I just kept telling them, "Why put a bandaid on the problem, when you can make it so they don't get sick to begin with, through genetics."

3. Happy Birthday!
There were 8 queen bees born on my birthday, April 14th, at the Yerba Buena Model Top Bar Apiary. We just kept caging virgin queen after queen.





Cutting a Langstroth frame to fit a Top Bar comb saver

4. Transferring a Langstroth Hive to a Top Bar Hive
• You can do this by making comb savers and cutting 4 fully capped brood frames from a strong
and healthy Langstroth hive during a nectar flow. Put the frames and any bees remaining into the Langstroth for them to draw it out with new beeswax.

• You add the queen to the Top Bar Hive and shake in 4-6 frames of bees

• Then put the Top Bar hive in place of the original Langstroth so it can gain all the worker bees and move the Langstroth hive to a new location.

• The Langstroth hive will raise a new queen with all of their hefty resources.

5. Candle Making
I taught candle making/wax products classes to groups that had already had a top bar hive donated and transferred from a Langstroth so that they have a way to make money with the wax they would begin harvesting. There is no local wick manufacturer so I pressed the idea of wick experimentation. Try using hemp rope, strips of wood, wicker harvested from the jungle.

Jessie showing beekeepers how to make candles and other
wax-based products

6. Recipe Building
As Jamaicans start producing more beeswax, I gave them a basic lip balm recipe and taught them how to build on it to produce different products including lotion, mosquito Balm, healing salve, and petroleum jelly. People pay more money for beeswax that has not been treated with miticides.

7. No Winter
Did you know that there is no winter in Jamaica? I had to keep wrapping my brain about the idea of nectar flow and dearth instead of winter and summer. In the height of summer (July-August) it is so hot that trees aren't producing nectar. You have to view this as our winter and build up your hives to have at least 12 combs to survive these tough months.

St. Mary Bee Club

8. Top Bar Hive Management
Pests, disease? No worries, try different management techniques that I use all the time with Top Bar:
• Wax Moths: harvest some of your comb, the bees have too much to protect.
• Foulbrood: if you hold your comb up to the sun and can't see through it, time to harvest it out of the hive and let the bees draw new comb. That black comb harbors disease, feces, cocoon buildup. As Agape Adams calls it, a sewer!
• Chalkbrood: Requeen and make sure they aren't getting exposed to fungicides
• Mites: Re-queen for hygienic behavior, aka. bees clean the mites off each other

9. Jamaicans laugh at all my jokes
No seriously, Jamaicans get New Mexico dry humor and I went to great lengths to help beekeepers enjoy learning Top Bar Hives. I love this country and would love to return!

GIS and the Farmer to Farmer Program

Partners of the Americas Farmer to Farmer Program intern Sebastian Insfran is working on a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) project with program information from Haiti and the DR. GIS is a way to visualize, analyze, interpret, and understand data to show relationships, patterns, and trends. Specifically, he was looking at the island of Hispaniola and comparing regional information on childhood malnutrition, maps of Farmer to Farmer project sites, and maps showing the number of hosts in these places. The goals is to visualize the presence of  Farmer to Farmer as it relates with some food security and agricultural development indicators, through spatial data analysis. Some samples maps are below:

The visualization of Farmer to Farmer host organizations’ location was one of the main goals of his  assignment and he used several tools to create maps that showed the data. 

While the project is still underway, and there are some data limitations, it is interesting to see some of the potential uses of an ICT tool like GIS. Farmer to Farmer is always looking to use available tools and technologies to benefit and/or analyze our work in the region.

A Unified Disease Management Plan for the Constanza Valley, DR

Dr. Thomas Evans recently presented a case study on integrated pest and disease management at the 69th Annual Meeting of the Potomac Division of the American Phytopathological Society held in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.  The findings presented by Dr. Evans were based on his team's Farmer to Farmer trips to the Dominican Republic's Constanza valley. Dr. Evans is a professor of plant pathology at the University of Delaware and his teammate Dr. Keil is a professor of Enthomology at the Catholic University of Ecuador, South America.  They have worked together on eight volunteer assignments in the Dominican Republic since 2008.  A final F2F assignment is planned for May 2013 where part of their agenda includes a Tomato Spotted Wilt Tospovirus (TSWV)/ Thrips Summit meeting with key packers and growers in the Constanza Valley. The findings presented in West Virginia will serve as a framework for the planned Summit meeting.

Google Earth Map identifying the location of the Constanza Valley

The Constanza Valley is located in the center of the island of Hispaniola at the height of 4,000 feet (1220 meters) in the middle of the Cordillera Central (Central Range). Open field production dates to the 1950s-1980s, the start of the large-scale greenhouse vegetable industry began in 2002 through grants and support from the Spanish government. Dr. Evans and Dr. Keil have focused their work on integrated pest and disease management as a way to address the re-emergence of the Tomato Spotted Wilt Tospovirus (TSWV) and Western Flower Thrips (WFT) observed in the Constanza Valley since 2009.  Substrate from burned rice hulls have been used in the greenhouse productions in Constanza, resulting in excessive fertigation and have been found to be directly correlated with higher thrips populations. TSWV has a wide host range in both greenhouse and open field productions, making it an enormous challenge to develop and implement effective disease management programs.

Western Flower Thrips threaten a variety of crops including peppers

As part of the disease management plan, Dr. Evans and Dr. Keil have promoted the mapping of the Constanza Valley with Google Earth tools and smart phones to determine the locations of all the susceptible crops and vegetable greenhouses. Part of the plan was also the selection of 5 fields and greenhouses that had thrips populations in varied crops for scouting during March, April and May. In addition to mapping and scouting, the plan includes conducting immunostrip testings of select plants to measure the incidence of TSWV and promote biological controls.  For the Constanza Valley Summit, the team will present the valley-wide issues, possible solutions and hope to foster a discussion for a unified management plan for thrips and TSWV in open fields and greenhouse vegetable productions.

FTF volunteers make use of GIS mapping tools as a way to monitor and contain thrips populations

Information and Communication Technology in Agricultural Development

Information and communication technologies (ICT) can play an important role in agricultural development, particularly in helping address the need for technical training, knowledge about markets, advertising, and more. ICT can help improve the livelihoods of farmers as well as the overall efficiency of agricultural sectors in developing countries.

Partners has increased the use of ICT tools in the Farmer to Farmer (F2F) program and is seeing results. Videos, for example, have been developed to help promote the products or work of host organizations, or serve as agricultural training tools. Information management specialists have helped universities develop library and catalog systems to better train students. And F2F currently has someone using a geographic information system (GIS) to map country projects against sub-regional data on stats like malnutrition to see how the program relates to poverty levels. As video has been a popular tool, below are some links to current and past videos, many of which have been highlighted elsewhere on the blog.

• This F2F video features the activities and impact of our program in Haiti. The history and activities of Haiti's own Makouti Agro Enterprise is also highlighted, and farmer beneficiaries share their stories. This video was created by three talented F2F volunteers. They have captured on film what many of our volunteers have experienced - a Program that is making a difference in Haiti's agricultural industry and the lives of farmers. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XawTlnqptU)
• F2F works with the whole dairy value chain in Nicaragua and volunteers interviewed farmers, business owners and others to bring to light the importance of consuming local dairy and meat products for nutritional and health reasons and it helps the local economy. The video is being aired on local TV stations and in schools, and is being promoted by cattle and dairy farmer associations. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzzQH1_tuHA)
• In Guyana, F2F volunteers combined an overview of a highly successful hydroponic shadehouse project with a training video. In the video, women offer their testimonials as well as their expertise on such topics as shadehouse bed preparation and how to mix and apply fertilizers. This video therefore serves to inspire potential shadehouse producers and to teach them technical skills. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgL9Nlk95G0)
• Also from Guyana is an example of a video on the Carambola Fruit Fly produced in collaboration with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) and the Ministry of Agriculture. In Guyana, carambola (also known as star fruit) is an important source of income for many farmers and the spread of the carambola fruit fly is of great concern to farmers and government agencies alike. In this eight minute video, a representative from the National Plant Protection Organization in Guyana is able to cover topics ranging from how to identify the fly larvae to how to create traps for the pest. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nECzl-2qtV0)

And we expect additional videos and increased use of ICT tools in the future.

Aspiring Mushroom Producers See the Fruits of Their Labor!

Nick and Agape bagging innoculated sawdust.

Agape and Kwao Adams of Yerba Buena Farm in St. Mary, Jamaica, have successfully grown their first mushrooms! Since December 2011, when Agape first requested a visit from a Mushroom Specialist, the Adams have been interested in producing mushrooms as they are one of the only crops that can thrive in the shade of mature fruit trees. Agape reports that most of the land in their area is dominated by fruit orchards; this is great when the trees are in season, however, during the off-season the land is unproductive.

In March 2012, the Adams received their first visit from Mushroom Specialist Nick Laskovski of Waitsfield, Vermont. Together, they inoculated various log species with shiitake and oyster mushroom spawn. Unfortunately, the dry season began shortly after Nick’s visit, and the Adams weren’t able to supply the spawn with the amount of water they required. Pests devoured the spawn before the spawn could colonize the logs.

Nick returned to Yerba Buena Farm in December 2012, this time during the rainy season. Not only did the weather provide the moisture that the spawn needed, but Nick and the Adams experimented with a new inoculation method; rather than inserting the spawn directly into logs, they inoculated sawdust in plastic bags – a more controlled environment shielded from pests.

 

Agape showing off her mushrooms!

Last month, Agape reported, “We ate our first mushrooms! The bag method is a success for oyster mushrooms. We are in communication with Nick and he's helping us figure out how best to fruit them. We are really happy and hopeful about growing mushrooms!”

Eventually, the Adams hope to see local mushroom producers competing with foreign exporters to supply shiitake and oyster mushrooms to Jamaica’s resorts and hotels.