New Agriculture Project

3/26/11

This first picture is a woman dry rice and corn. We are starting a new agriculture project in Tuguegarao. Seventy families have come together to form a coop. These 70 families have been broken up into groups of 10 with a leader that represents them. These are poor families that need to grow food to supplement their diet and perhaps sell the excess. The local government provided them with a daylong seminar in home food production. Also their soil needs some revitalization and so they were instructed in composting with given a kilo of earth worms to speed the process. LDS Charities chipped in with seeds, cement, sand, gravel and cement blocks to make the worm beds. Dennis and I took a random sample of the before pictures and will go back just before harvest time to record the after. We had so much fun visiting the various barangay sites of our new project. In the process we came across many of the recipients of our white corn farmer project of almost a year ago. People called us into their yards to show us the harvested corn crop that was from the seeds from the original batch we passed out. (Like the great grandchildren of our original seeds) We also saw vegetables that were from the seeds gleaned from the original seedlings we distributed. We noticed several people had also taken the initiative to grown seedlings ready for planting. It was so rewarding to see that the effort put into that project is perpetuating and people are still reaping the benefits. The last two pictures are families getting ready to build their worm beds and preparing space for their gardens.