Land Food Life
Calling all farmers, ranchers, and conscious eaters! Welcome to the LAND, FOOD, LIFE Podcast, where host Kara Kroeger takes you on a transformative journey designed to enhance the quality of life for all beings, YES, THAT INCLUDES YOU! Immerse yourself in the world of regenerative agriculture, nutrition, holistic healthcare, and advocacy for food and healthcare justice. Discover invaluable insights on how together we can heal the land, our ecosystems, and uplift our physical, mental, financial, creative, and spiritual health and well-being. Connect with the life giving soil beneath your feet, understand the origins and medicinal value (or lack thereof) of your food, and embrace the interconnectedness of all that surrounds you. Get ready, because this podcast is specifically crafted to change your outlook and sow the seeds of positive transformation within you and beyond. So listen up and together we will co-create a thriving planet!
Land Food Life
Roots of Renewal: Empowering Central American Subsistence Farmers for Climate Solutions with Florence Reed
Join us for a compelling conversation with Florence Reed, the visionary founder of Sustainable Harvest International, as we tackle the urgent global challenges of deforestation and agricultural sustainability. Discover the transformative power of climate-smart subsistence farming practices in Central America and the significant role tropical forests play in our climate's health. Florence shares heartwarming stories from her work with rural farmers and a glimpse into her documentary "Roots of Renewal," which beautifully captures the magic of turning degraded lands into flourishing agroforestry systems that allow these farmers to thrive.
We'll unpack the short-sighted gains of traditional methods, like slash-and-burn, that lead to devastating land degradation and biodiversity loss, trapping farmers in cycles of poverty. Florence and I discuss how Sustainable Harvest International is breaking this cycle through an innovative multi-year program that empowers farming families with low-cost sustainable practices that promote soil health, improve nutrition, and reduce the dependency on harmful agrochemicals.
Learn how SHI's sustainable farming cohort programs are reshaping gender dynamics and empowering women to take a leading role in agricultural and financial decision-making. We also cover the critical role listeners can play in this impactful mission, ensuring a healthier and more equitable world for future generations.
Resources:
Learn about Kara's Land Food Life Community Cleanse & Reset 28-day program that starts January 2nd, 2025 https://www.landfoodlife.com/cleanse
Visit Sustainable Harvest International's website https://www.sustainableharvest.org/
Watch the Roots of Renewal documentary for free www.rootsofrenewal.info
Learn about Kara Kroeger and her holistic nutrition and agroecology education services https://www.landfoodlife.com/
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Land Food Life podcast. In this space, we discuss holistic concepts inspiring you to steward your awareness and actions in collaboration with all of nature to regenerate ourselves and our remarkable planet. I'm your host, cara Kroger, a certified nutritionist, chef and agroecology educator. In each episode, it is my desire to empower you with knowledge about food, health and agriculture that will help raise the quality of life for all beings. Please visit landfoodlifecom to learn more about my offerings. Thank you for listening. Let's dive in, all right. So before we get started today, I want to take a minute to invite you to join me this January 2025 to a truly enlightening experience the land food life community cleanse and reset. This is a virtually guided cleansing journey that is hosted by yours truly, and I specifically designed it to support and uplift you as you clear old metabolic and mindset debris from your body and mind to start the year off fresh. So if you can imagine, in a mere 28 days, being able to get more done by optimizing your energy and focus, shedding a few pounds while profoundly nourishing your body yes, this is possible and discover the connection between what you eat and your mood and how to stabilize cravings. We'll also focus on overhauling your digestion, absorption and elimination to improve all kinds of physical and emotional symptoms, especially those physical aches and pains that we just generally tend to feel as we age. And, last but not least, we're going to identify limiting beliefs and embrace new paradigms that create more positivity in your life. So throughout the four week guided process, you're going to learn a plethora of life hacks that will help you create lasting results. And most people find this cleanse easier than their usual day-to-day eating routines because the supplementation protocol and the meal options are really well spelled out, and, in fact, one of my previous cleanse participants who eats pretty well, mind you said that she never realized how undernourished her body felt before the cleanse compared to during it, and many people are eating foods that lack ideal nutrients or they'll reduce their food intake to lose weight, and they don't realize that they're robbing their bodies of vital nutrients that create health and vitality. So the land, food, life cleanse and reset takes a incredibly nourishing approach to cleansing that results in substantial benefits beyond just a few shedded pounds and, additionally, you're supported by me and a group of really positive people going through the process all together in four live webinars. So grab a friend or partner and invest in the most important thing you have your very precious health. And if you want to learn more about all the juicy details, please visit landfoodlifecom. Front slash cleanse. Registration for this event ends December 20th. We have to ship products to people and get them there by January 2nd when the cleanse begins, so we have to close registration on December 20th so we can do that. So, again, the details are at landfoodlifecom. Front slash cleanse.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's go ahead and dive into this episode. Every day, subsistence farmers around the globe are really struggling to provide their families with the modest food and income that they need to survive and thrive, and many are relying on destructive agricultural practices like deforestation, and they're farming marginal lands for really short periods of time and they lack the access to learn more sustainable farming techniques. And these practices have caused us to lose half of the world's tropical forests, and we're losing the other half at a rate of one acre every second, and that is very devastating and causing a lot of health issues all around the planet. And, as a result, more than half of the species of plants and animals in the world are disappearing, along with the carbon stores that stabilize the climate.
Speaker 1:So my guest today is Florence Reed, also known as Flo, and she's the founder of Sustainable Harvest International to provide local long-term technical assistance and training to rural farming families in Central America that equips and empowers them with regenerative farming practices to improve their income and their health, and it's a remarkable program. So today we're going to be chatting with Flo about her work and her newly released documentary, roots of Renewal, which can be found on WaterBear and that is a platform at waterbearcom. And if, after listening to this episode, you would like to get a visual of the farmers and farms Sustainable Harvest works with in Central America, I highly recommend you watch this wonderful documentary highlighting the work of Flo and Sustainable Harvest International. I know you will enjoy it. Flo, welcome Welcome to the Land Food Life Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Thanks, cara, it's great to be here.
Speaker 1:Yes, I'm very excited about this conversation. I hold Central America dear in my heart after having spent a lot of time there in my early 20s and late teens, and so I'm very excited to have this conversation because in my mind's eye, I can really feel what it's like to be there and all the things we're going to be talking about today. So I'd like to start with a question of why should our listeners be concerned with the deforestation of tropical forests and the well-being of substance farmers around the globe to improve their own health and well-being wherever they are in the world their own health and well-being wherever they are in the world.
Speaker 2:Well, I think there's a lot of reasons, cara. First of all, and the most important to me, is that all of us humans share this beautiful planet, and I really hope we can keep it livable for human society. And I think people are pretty aware now that the world's forests, especially the tropical forests, are playing a major role mitigating climate change and helping head off the worst of the climate chaos that we're headed towards storing carbon in the trees, and the farmers in Central America are putting trees back onto that deforested land as they move to agroforestry practices and incorporate trees with their other crops. So that's one reason.
Speaker 2:Then, I think the other biggest crisis that we're facing on this planet is biodiversity loss, and the world's tropical forests are home to most of the world's biodiversity, so in losing them, we are losing that biodiversity. It's the source of most of our medicines and so many other products in our lives that we don't realize have their origins from plants in the tropical forests. And then there's the human component, where I think all of us suffer if not everybody is able to meet their basic needs, and when farmers aren't able to grow enough to feed their families, they feel forced into lots of terrible situations, including making often dangerous, difficult trip to try to come to the US and many of my best friends are immigrants from Central America and certainly I'm happy that they're here can agree that we don't want anyone to feel forced to leave their homes and go to another country just to survive, and so giving families the opportunity to sustain themselves in their own communities I think is important on many levels.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. Can you tell us a little bit about how you entered into this work? You wound up in Central America as a Peace Corps volunteer, and can you tell us a little bit about how that inspired you to start working with Central American farmers and doing the work you're doing today?
Speaker 2:Sure. So I went into the Peace Corps back in the early 90s and was sent to a small rural community in Panama and I was supposed to be doing environmental education, but that didn't really work out. And then I think, as is sometimes the case with Peace Corps, you end up having to kind of figure things out as you go, which is a skill that I've kept with me and one of the reasons I'm grateful to Peace Corps skill that I've kept with me and one of the reasons I'm grateful to Peace Corps. What I ended up doing was working with community groups on reforestation projects, helping them to set up community tree nurseries and then plant those tree seedlings out onto the deforested land, and I spent most of my two years as a Peace Corps volunteer doing that work. But towards the very end I realized that all of the thousands of trees that we were planting, that I was so proud of, were probably going to be cut down and burned before too terribly long, because the farmers practicing slash and burn farming were constantly having to find new areas to burn and grow their crops to feed their families. And so I realized that key to keeping those trees there was offering the farmers alternatives where they could grow a productive farm on one piece of land year after year and not have to constantly cut down more forest, more trees.
Speaker 2:So the last few months of my Peace Corps service I did some workshops and taught some classes for the farmers in my reforestation groups about sustainable agriculture practices. We tried implementing some of them to test them out. And then my Peace Corps time was up. I left. I went back a year later and I had found that the reforestation work I'd done was continuing, but I found that the sustainable agriculture that I had tried to squeeze in at the end had been left by the wayside.
Speaker 2:And so I came out of Peace Corps, I think, with a couple of key lessons, one being that local trainers will always be more effective than foreigners.
Speaker 2:Or maybe I shouldn't say always, but in instances like this, where we're trying to really change the way small scale farmers and remote rural communities are farming and change the way they've been doing it probably for generations, that local people are going to be more effective. Not to say that the Peace Corps doesn't have a tremendous amount of value, but as far as actually getting the work done, transforming the farming practices, local people will be more effective. So that was one lesson, and then the other key lesson was that it takes multiple years for those new farming practices to take hold, if it's really a full transformation of farming to an ecological approach, that there's multiple components that have to be brought in bit by bit, built on each other, and the farmers have to see how they work, get help addressing the new issues that arise from using these new practices before they can continue on their own and feel confident in using the new farming practices. So those were my two biggest takeaways from my Peace Corps experience.
Speaker 1:I gotcha. Yes, can you just talk for a second about some of the ecological effects of slash and burn? Some people may not be familiar exactly with why that is and, ultimately, what are the devastating effects of it and why does it need to be avoided.
Speaker 2:Sure Well, first I think I should say that slash and burn farming was probably good, sustainable practice at one time when it was first used by indigenous people, where they would clear a small area in the forest and grow some crops which they would use to complement the hunting and gathering that they were doing in the surrounding forest, and then eventually they would leave that cleared area for the forest to come back in from all sides and the forest would restore itself and then the farmers would clear another area, and I think that was probably very sustainable and good practice. But of course things have changed a lot over the centuries. The population is much larger. Larger areas of flat, better farming land are usually owned by the big wealthy land owners. The poorer farmers are pushed up into the foothills and into the mountains where they're growing, often on surprisingly steep slopes. I've occasionally had to use my hands to climb up the side of a cornfield, which was not something I ever imagined growing up in the US.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking of the cornfields in the Midwest here. And so now when the farmers burn their land, they're burning an area that's no longer surrounded by old growth forest, probably burning land that's surrounded by other land that was burned not too long ago. And the ash does act, still, as a type of fertilizer. It helps the crops grow for maybe a year, but very quickly that ash is washed away. The topsoil is washed away. In these areas in the tropics, where we work and where we work in Central America, it's usually very thin topsoil, so there's not a lot there to begin with. So if you lose a little bit each time, it's not too long before the topsoil is all gone, and then at that point farmers often are left with no choice but to move to a whole new area. And I think that's why I've seen national parks where, right behind the national park sign, somebody's burned the forest and is growing their corn right there inside the national park. That's supposed to be a protected tropical forest.
Speaker 2:So many people feel forced to migrate to cities, to migrate to other countries and so on, and then of course, with the loss of the forest, we're also losing the habitat for all of that biodiversity, and that's not to mention the fact that the smoke is obviously not great for the environment, not great for our health. Not great for our health. I mean, you're from Texas, cara, and so you're probably well aware that the smoke from that burning in Mexico and Central America goes all the way up to Texas and affects people's health as far away as Texas, not to mention in the countries where the burning is happening. So, for multiple reasons, I think slash and burn farming is no longer a healthy or viable option for most farmers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I think that it's really amazing that within your organization, your trainers are going in and teaching new methodologies, which is really beautiful. So tell us a little bit more about how you've seen this environmental degradation and poverty fuel one another, and what you think our best options are for breaking this cycle.
Speaker 2:Sure. So, as I said, with the slash and burn farming, the land gets degraded and then the farmers are producing less and less on that land, obviously affecting their food security, affecting their ability to have anything to sell to have money to meet other basic needs. And so this cycle fuels that hunger and poverty. And at the same time, farmers might be given the idea that using agrochemicals will get them out of this difficulty and allow them to produce more on their land and grow on the same land. And that may be true sometimes in the short term.
Speaker 2:But chemical fertilizers also degrade the land over time and they lead to the same problems. And that's not to mention the fact that they're expensive and they're getting more expensive. They're based usually on petroleum products and of course we're going to be running out of fossil fuels, and so if farmers are dependent on chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels, that puts them in a precarious situation, and often they end up spending more than they make, which obviously does not help with getting out of poverty. And then, of course, the same would be true for pesticides that are bought from outside of the farms Absolutely yeah.
Speaker 2:And then that's not even taking into account the broader environmental impacts of the chemical fertilizers, of course. In addition to harming the soil on the farms, they often get washed out into the oceans and they cause the dead zones in the oceans. The pesticides, in addition to killing the pests, kill everything else in the ecosystem. Well, not everything else, obviously, but they have a really terrible impact on biodiversity, including all the beneficial microorganisms and other fauna that help create a healthy, balanced ecosystem on a farm as well as on the planet.
Speaker 1:Indeed. So yes, we're dealing with very acidic soils in these tropical environments, which it's already hard to farm in very acidic soils, and then adding those agrochemicals really can be devastating to the microbiology in the soil and that microbiology really is what fuels everything. So a little bit about the five phases that you use, that your trainers use when you are working with different farmers. So in general you work with farming families for about four to five years is my understanding, and you use this five phase approach. Can you kind of walk us through what that looks like and how you from how you find the trainers that are training the families that you work with, and then what that trainer does with them?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah, this is a methodology that we've developed and have been continually improving, and it's been evolving for the 27 years that we've been doing this work, but the basics have stayed pretty much the community. They work well. Until recently they were working with an average of about 30 or 40 families over this multiple year program. We've recently finished a pilot where we paired our professional trainers with farmer mentors or promoters, and we're finding that that allows us to reach more like 75 farmers per trainer, and so I think that is probably going to be the next evolution in our methodology, but the components would still remain the same, the basics. So we start out just working with each family individually to develop a plan. Well, going back, we have community meetings to explain what we offer, which is mostly technical assistance, training, what we don't offer, which is we don't offer handouts, unless maybe it's some seeds or some materials in order to adopt a new practice and get started with it. We explain what we expect from the families who join the program, which is their time, that they will dedicate at least a part of their land to trying the new practices that we bring, and so that they will take in the knowledge that we're offering to them and that they will also share all of the tremendous knowledge that they have with our trainers. So it's very much a cooperative practice. It's a two-way street of knowledge sharing, which then gets spread further around.
Speaker 2:As one of my favorite farmers, elliot Coleman, likes to say, knowledge is like manure it's only useful if you spread it around. We very much believe that. So then we have the individual planning, so that each family decides what they want to accomplish with our program, and this whole process takes several months. And then at the end each family has two pictures that they've drawn one of what their land looks like and one of what they want it to look like Acts as sort of a guide for the coming years as they continue to work with their sustainable harvest field trainer. From there they start learning some of these new ecologically-based farming practices that will increase the production on the farm. It will diversify the production of the farm. We bring some nutrition in there so they can learn to feed themselves better, produce a healthy, balanced diet for themselves. By the time they graduate, usually on average, the families are growing about 91% of the food that they eat, so that obviously is the best kind of food security. I think that's impressive, flo.
Speaker 1:That's really impressive. That's really exciting to hear.
Speaker 2:Impressive, flo. That's really impressive. That's really exciting to hear. What they're doing is not only now for the benefit of their family directly but for the broader environment, which also, of course, benefits their family. But it also benefits their community and benefits all of us on the planet. And so we start to bring that in working more on thinking about the business side of farming, what crops can be sold to get better income, how to find good markets for those crops and those, those more sort of business aspects. We help some of the communities set up community loan funds so that they'll have access to credit, probably for the first time.
Speaker 2:And then the very last phase of the work is just preparing the families to graduate from the program, making sure that they're ready to continue on their own without regular assistance, although they're obviously are able to stay in contact with our local staff if they choose to our local offices, if they choose to. Beyond that, but making sure they're ready to continue on their own, giving them skills to share what they've learned with their neighbors, with other farmers, and giving them skills to be leaders in their community to continue this move towards restoring the environment in their communities. And then there's a graduation and they get diplomas, there's a party. There's usually music and dancing and food. Family members come from other parts of the country. It's it's really like a college graduation and it's a lot of fun and a very proud moment for for the families and for our local staff who have worked with them for the years leading up to the graduation.
Speaker 1:So do you have cohorts that are doing this all together at the same time, or would the graduation be for the years leading up to the graduation? So do you have cohorts that are doing this all together at the same time, or would the graduation be for the individual family, or do you have families celebrating together?
Speaker 2:We have cohorts of families, so those 30 or 40 or, going forward, maybe 75 families that are in one community and have gone through the program together. They will all graduate together. The way our field trainers work with the families is they will do workshops and classes where all of the families will come together in one place to learn about a new practice and then they'll go back to implement it on each individual farm with continued assistance from our trainers. But usually the big initial learning for a lot of the practices happens together and then they graduate together and when they come together they also are learning from each other as well as the practices that our trainers bring in. So there's multiple benefits and with time there's seed saving and seed exchange and food exchange and all of that.
Speaker 1:That's really beautiful. Yeah, I've done a lot of work myself in creating networks for peer-to-peer learning amongst farmers, and that's where the magic happens. Right Is sharing those very specific details about things that you're experiencing regionally. Right, when you bring producers together who farm in the same region, they can only I mean, they do a very good job of lifting each other up and supporting one another, so that's really cool. So how many of your wind up becoming community leaders themselves and, you know, taking the message forward into new cohorts?
Speaker 2:Sure, so this is an area we'd like to study more. We have gone back and interviewed a number of the families 5, 10, 15 years after they've graduated from the program. We've found that 91% of them are continuing to use practices that they learned in the program, continuing to benefit from them, continuing to benefit from them, and they have shared what they learned with their neighbors. But we don't have as much hard data on what that sharing looks like as we would like, and that's something that we hope to do going forward.
Speaker 1:That's very cool. So, with regard to this training process, some of what you described sounds like holistic management planning. Are you familiar with holistic management and is that ringing a bell?
Speaker 2:I'm not sure if I'm familiar with specifically the term holistic management, but I can gather what it means and it certainly seems to fit with what Sustainable Harvest does. We often talk about our work in terms of holistic approach to farming and to use of the land, their community, the planet, and what pieces can they do to improve the overall health for their families, for the community, for the planet, and that it takes a lot of different pieces. So it involves planting trees back onto the land for a variety of different purposes. Back onto the land for a variety of different purposes. It involves, maybe shifting from cooking over an open fire to building a wood conserving stove that uses much less firewood, so those trees don't have to be cut down that have been planted. Maybe it's just pruning branches from the trees now to do the cooking because you use so much less firewood.
Speaker 2:It's a vegetable garden near the house so that the family has a variety of fresh vegetables to eat on a regular basis.
Speaker 2:It's having a bigger area growing the staples of the diet, things like corn beans, maybe cassava, that are the traditional staples of the diet.
Speaker 2:So not losing that part of the culture, while also introducing new crops, maybe, or reintroducing crops that have been lost over time. It's looking at what sources of protein make sense. There's the beans, of course, but in a remote rural community things can happen there's where you, for one reason or another, maybe you lose your beans, and then what's your protein source? So there's looking at maybe integrating some livestock in things like fish ponds, chicken coops, so that the yard chickens that everybody has have a safer place to roost at night and to lay their eggs, and so that provides more protein to the families. In some cases it's yard iguanas, because iguana is a popular meat and so it's become endangered in the wild. But families can raise them like chickens, and if they want to eat iguana they can eat the ones they raise instead of the ones in the wild, and some of them escape back to the wild too, so maybe it has a net benefit.
Speaker 1:I remember driving through Guatemala and you know, looking out from the bus window as you're going across the landscape and saw iguanas on a spit over the fire. I was like, oh my goodness, look at that. It's just when they get a little crispy on the fire, it's quite an image.
Speaker 2:I was just going to say that I remember a friend of mine having a group of indigenous women from Panama visiting him and that they wanted to go to Kentucky Fried Chicken and so he took them, and then he asked them if it was as good as they thought it would be, and they had said oh yes, it tastes like iguana.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. They should start a new product, oh, a new product.
Speaker 2:I just thought ad campaign. Kentucky Fried Chicken tastes like iguana, yeah.
Speaker 1:Or start iguana in the KFCs that are in Latin America.
Speaker 2:Right, but not if we're going to be dealing with an endangered, not once in a while, but please, yeah, no endangered iguanas.
Speaker 1:Oh man, Well, one other question that I'd like to ask as well is you have been doing this for a very long time you have been overarchingly in this work for 30 years and I'd like to know what kind of obstacles you've had to overcome as a woman being a leader in this work.
Speaker 2:Hmm, that's a good question. I think I've been lucky working in Central America, where the fact that I'm a foreigner, that I'm from the United States, that I'm college educated, all of that, I think, sort of overcame the fact that I was a woman and so within Central America generally have not, I think, faced the same challenges that I suspect a Central American woman might face in Central America. That said, there were certainly elements there, particularly back when I was in the Peace Corps. I definitely had experiences where I was spoken to very disrespectfully by people who were supposed to be my colleagues because of my being a woman. But I always was able to shrug it off and I didn't feel like it really got in the way of my work. Um, those were the government officials that did that. The farmers were always very respectful, um, very kind and um, I I always had a very.
Speaker 2:I've had for all those 30 years I've had, I think, only positive experiences working with the farmers in the rural communities In the US. We're not immune here either. It's been subtle, but I have definitely felt that there were times, you know, even within leadership, within our own organization as well as outside, where I definitely have felt like I was not being taken as seriously because of being a woman, suggested that I should be prioritizing my family and that really I shouldn't be trying to be in a leadership role when I have a family to look out for, things like that which have been a little hard to swallow, but overall I don't feel like it's gotten in my way a whole lot.
Speaker 2:I continue to forge ahead.
Speaker 1:Forge ahead. We must. That is, we have a lot of work to do, and I think the question that I'd like to ask is you know, I feel like the feminine voice is impacting improvements in climate. Improvements in climate and in general, how is the female voice being heard in ways that maybe it hasn't been able to in the past?
Speaker 2:if you can speak to that, I'm sure, and I think the female voice, I think we're hearing it more obviously from women, but I think also because of that, it's allowing men and other genders as well to bring more of that feminine voice into the conversation, sort of across the board, sort of a nurturing kind of perspective that's looking and again, whether this is women or others thinking about the importance of nurturing our families, our biological families, nurturing our communities, which are, in my mind, just an extension of our family, and then family and then ultimately the life on this planet where we're all connected. I feel that very strongly and so I feel that we need to nurture all of life and always bring that into the conversation. And I do feel that that shift has been happening and I see that at United Nations, large gatherings to community gatherings, and certainly it's not always there, it's not complete, but I do feel that there's been positive momentum in that regard.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, I agree. For the first time ever, there's more women entering farming than there is men, at least in the US, and that's interesting. It is often due to land succession right being passed on into families where the woman is the main person who's willing to take over the farm, and so that's one way. And then, of course, there's a lot of new farmers who are women and coming into agriculture as well with this movement of wanting to be closer to the land. So I'm promising, and I, you know, I agree.
Speaker 1:Yes, the voice is. There's still a lot of room for more of that voice to be heard in other, in various platforms, but there is more of it happening. I've only been in agriculture for eight years, nine years, but I've noticed a huge increase, and it's been a very beautiful thing to be a part of and see that, especially in the regenerative ag movement, where that voice is allowed to be heard as well as the indigenous voice a little bit more, which is important, because in the indigenous voice, the balance of masculine and feminine seems to play out a little bit better, and so I think that that is a beautiful thing. So, yeah, thanks for sharing your perspective on that. Tell me also I'm curious how you've seen dynamics within the farming families change as through your program, have you noticed that sort of thing?
Speaker 2:I know our program director is now actually collecting data on this as well, which is interesting to see, and I seem to recall something like 80% change that the women perceive in gender dynamics within the family, in having a stronger voice in decisions, and I think that's because when Sustainable Harvest works in a community, we open the program up to everybody in the community. Anybody can ask to be part of the program and usually that one person in the family is our primary liaison with that family that we work with. And in the beginning when I started Sustainable Harvest, that was almost always men, occasionally maybe a single mother. That's shifted quite a bit. Now 40% of the primary farmers in the program are women. But in any case, whenever we work with a family we do try to work with the entire family. We encourage parents and parents, children, grandchildren to all be involved in whatever way makes sense for them.
Speaker 2:And in many cases I've talked with the women about how things have gone in the program for them, what changes they've seen, and a number of times they've told me that previous to going through Sustainable Harvest's program, their husbands made all the decisions about how the money would be spent, but then through our program they became equal partners in this work and their husbands started to see them more as equals.
Speaker 2:Their husband started to see them more as equals and they became more partners in decisions, particularly about the family's finances and how they would be using their land and all of these other pieces. And so I felt really good hearing about that and also hearing women. I remember one woman in particular talking about how her mental health used to suffer, suffered from depression, and then she said, going through our program, she started to look forward to every morning because it was no longer going to be a morning of just household chores that she was going to be out with her grandchildren working in the garden outside the house picking fruit from the fruit trees they planted, and so she was actually looking forward to each day, whereas she hadn't in the past. So I love seeing those.
Speaker 1:Nothing like connecting with the earth to improve your mental health. Yes, I've heard often on this podcast for everybody to get outside and put their body on the earth. You know their feet bare feet, and we're laid down. It's just, I think, a very important thing for us to be close to mother nature. So I curious. So you know central americans are very playful people and they're oftentimes playing jokes on each other and you know being funny, and so I'm really curious if you have any stories, um, any funny stories about working with farm farming families or any jokes that you know people played on you that you think would be interesting for our listeners to hear.
Speaker 2:Well, let's see. I guess the first one that comes to mind this was actually one of our staff that played this joke.
Speaker 2:I think the farmers are often just too respectful to play a joke joke on me maybe, but I remember one year we took some of our field trainers from each of the four countries where we were working.
Speaker 2:We took them all to Earth University in Costa Rica for some training and one of the workshops was about efficient microorganisms and collecting soil from the forest to get the bacteria and the fungus and and all of that to inoculate what was being applied on the farms to improve the productivity of the farms. And so we were all out in the forest and that I think, I think it was Gustavo was. I know it was one of our field trainers from Belize, because he was Mayan and I have a tremendous amount of respect for Indigenous knowledge, and maybe a little too much occasionally, because we were out there walking and Gustave all of a sudden stopped and said careful, fleur, I smell a fer-de-lance, which is an extremely poisonous snake. And I said you can smell a fer-de-lance? And he said yes, my grandparents taught me how to smell different types of snakes and I definitely smell a fer-de-lance, and so I was terrified of poisoning a snake somewhere near us until he burst out laughing and said oh, you'll believe anything, won't you?
Speaker 1:however, though you know I I wouldn't put it past a Mayan person to be able to smell a snake.
Speaker 2:I have often been amazed at the knowledge that they do have. So no, I wouldn't have been that surprised. I guess the other story that comes to mind is sort of a funny not funny story, but for some reason it's sort of a funny not funny story, but for some reason it came right into my mind. This was a number of years ago and I was in Honduras and I had recently developed a severe problem with my ankle, and I was staying in the home of one of our field trainers and I woke up that morning and could not put any weight on this ankle without excruciating searing pain, and so it was obvious I wasn't going to be able to follow through on the plans that day to go up into one of the remote communities and walk a distance out to the farms and visit the farmers that I had intended to visit. And so I was left behind and my partner, bruce, who was the program director at the time. He went without me and with our Honduran staff, and I stayed behind, feeling bad that I was missing out on this, feeling bad for myself, feeling bad, hoping that the families wouldn't be offended, that I didn't make it.
Speaker 2:Bruce came back at the end of the day and we started to talk about the visit and I said they weren't disappointed that I couldn't make it, were they? And he said, well, they did paint hundreds of rocks white and lay them out across the hillside in huge letters to say Bienvenida Florencia, welcome to Florida for your visit. But aside from that, no, they probably weren't that disappointed. And I said, oh, you're making that up. And he took out the camera and showed me a picture of the hillside with this huge Bienvenida Florencia across it.
Speaker 1:I felt so bad. That's unbelievable. Well, it's beautiful that he was able to capture it and share it, and you know what an amazing gesture. So, and I made it back the following year. That's awesome. So your name is, you know it means flower, right? Yeah, flower, which is a really, really important symbol to the Mayan culture, right, and so many of the different indigenous cultures. So sometimes I think it's interesting to think about. You know how we live up to our names in some way, right?
Speaker 2:Yes, even if it wasn't our parents.
Speaker 1:Yeah, reason for the name. Yes, it wasn't intentional, but yeah. So let's see here we talked a little bit just to kind of go back into some of the agricultural practices. We had spoken in our pre-call about how you really don't try to ask these farmers to come off of using the agrochemicals, because it kind of takes a little time to integrate some of the other things to be put into place before you think that that's the best thing to do, and coming off of agrochemicals can take a very long time from both a practical approach and a social perspective. And so I'm curious what some of the most unique methods are that you teach to help farmers come off agrochemicals and some of the things that maybe you've also learned from farmers there that worked well, that you have asked the trainers to share in their communities along the way.
Speaker 2:I'm sure, and I should say that of course every farmer in the program is different. But some are using little or no agrochemicals when they join. They're using more just the slash and burn farming and others are quite dependent on using a lot of agrochemicals. So there's a variety there and we do not place any restrictions on the farmers, that we're not going to throw them out of the program if they want to continue using agrochemicals. We discourage their use and find that using the practices we teach, the farmers can get excellent, usually better results without them within a relatively short time, within a couple, two, three years at most, and so we encourage that. But then ultimately it's up to the farmers, and often they'll want to try the new practices in a small area, see what the results they get, before then expanding to other areas and in most cases, I think, ultimately abandoning entirely or almost entirely the use of the expensive toxic chemicals that they have to get from outside the farm when they can get the same results almost entirely from within the farm. And so some of the practices that we teach, they're based on two basic concepts I would say. One is biodiversity, increasing the diversity of plants and animals on the farm, and then the other is soil health. So when it comes to biodiversity, now we're talking about bringing in ideas like agroforestry systems where trees are planted together with other crops, so maybe that's multi-story plantations like shade coffee, where there's hardwood trees, nuts, fruits, spices, all growing on trees, and other trees planted maybe strictly for environmental purposes, but that are shading the coffee, that the coffee naturally needs shade to grow. Well, they've developed some that don't, which is unfortunate, but for these farms they grow the varieties that do best in the shade, and so the coffee might be the main product. But then there's all these other products from the trees, and then other crops can be grown. You can have orchids growing on the trees, including ones like vanilla. You can have things like ginger growing on the ground in the shade of the trees, and personally, for me, this is my favorite growing system in the tropics, and we'd only do that if it was for my own personal gratification, but of course it's for the farmers, and most of them want their tortillas or their rice and beans or their yuca frita cassava, and so we also work with ways to grow those traditional staple crops that people want that probably would not do well in a forest environment, and so in those cases, in terms of biodiversity, we'll encourage intercropping, crop rotation, bringing in a greater variety of crops, and then the soil health is a big part of it as well, as I said.
Speaker 2:So we help farmers to build up soil health, mostly by just getting as much organic material back into the soil as possible. That can be done with composting and different types of composting, like bokashi compost. It can be done with cover crops Makuna and kannavalia are the most common that we use Combining it with intercropping and agroforestry. It can be things like alley rows of nitrogen-fixing trees that can be pruned back and the leaves can be used as a mulch that degrade and put that organic material and that nitrogen back into the soil and other types of mulch as well I mean assuming it's not plastic mulch, which we don't use we use all organic mulches in our program.
Speaker 2:Then, once the soil is built up, or even before it's built up, whatever you've got, of course you want to keep it in place.
Speaker 2:Also, and, as I said, a lot of the farmers in our program are growing on hillsides and you can have erosion anywhere, but if you're growing on a hillside you have more erosion, and so we'll work with a lot of the farmers to start planting on the contour, which decreases erosion, instead of planting rows up and down the hillside along those contours.
Speaker 2:We will work with them to put in erosion barriers, so like rows of stone or logs or plants like lemongrass or pineapple or plants that will really hold the soil in place and form a barrier, just like the rocks or the tree trunks or branches or whatever will form a barrier. That then builds up a natural terrace over time as the soil is washed down and hits those barriers. Or sometimes the terraces are actually cut into the hillside and forming terraces that way. So all of that helps to keep the keep the the soil in place, especially as you build it up and improve it. Um, so I know there's there's a lot more. There's so many practices that all connect with each other, but uh, that's, that's a few of them.
Speaker 1:Cool, that's cool. Yeah, we would do the. Uh putting so in where I have done a lot of work in livestock production, there's a lot of hills and slopes and very thin soils in some of those areas and so we've done a lot of that contour where we just stack brush along the contour of the hill. That then slowly allows the soil to build up and the seeds that come along with that soil and propagate more native grasses in those arenas.
Speaker 2:I think that's something that people often don't realize with our program is that it's not only appropriate to Central America. Most of the basic concepts we teach could be used, I think, pretty much anywhere in the world maybe a little more so in the tropics, but the basic concepts really work anywhere. And then the details vary obviously by geography and climate and so on, but the basics the same everywhere.
Speaker 1:Right, absolutely. So I'm curious are there many value added products made by what your farmers are producing? Are they kind of taking them and processing them into a product that has more value, rather than just being sold as the actual product itself?
Speaker 2:There are value-added products. That is part of the training that we offer towards the end of the program. Honestly, I feel like it hasn't been our strongest area. We'd like to see better results there, methodology one of which is possibly separating out and strengthening and approaching a little bit differently the whole business piece, everything from the marketing to the finance to the value added. But, that said, we definitely have done workshops on adding value and we've seen families have success. So a couple examples would be.
Speaker 2:One that I've seen often is plantains, so a lot of the families begin growing plantains in our program. If anybody in North America isn't familiar, it's like a large starchy banana. It's very popular in Central American cooking and elsewhere in the world, I imagine and so the families grow the plantains and they'll often make them into plantain chips. So it's like potato chips, but with plantains, and they're a very popular snack in Central America, and so that's a good way to earn quite a bit more than selling just the plantains themselves. I've also seen some of the families making jams and marmalades from the fruit that they grow. So that's another way that I've seen the families earning more from what they're growing.
Speaker 1:And yeah, yeah, that's beautiful. I bought Minnie a bag of some fried plantain chips.
Speaker 2:They're pretty tasty.
Speaker 1:It's good stuff for sure. Yeah, yeah, beautiful. So I also am very curious about what kind of extension services are in these countries already. Are so extension service for listeners who maybe aren't familiar is generally technical assistance provided by the government that helps producers acquire new practices that will hopefully benefit their businesses. Have you looked into collaborating with any of these extension services, kind of like a train the trainer situation where you're teaching some of these methodologies? Are some of these extension service providers already teaching any of this? Like what's the state of that in these countries?
Speaker 2:countries, the governments are starting to look more at agroecology, at sustainable farming practices, and so I'm encouraged by that. Historically, what I saw in the countries where we work and in other countries, including the US, is that I think the extension programs are influenced by um, the deep pockets of the agrochemical companies, and that's where the extension dollars end up going, and I certainly saw that when I was in the peace Corps with extension agents driving out to the communities and dropping off bags of chemicals and driving away again. My greatest hope, I think, for Sustainable Harvest's work is that eventually we will be able to work with government extension programs and help them shift to a methodology that looks a lot more like our methodology. Sustainable Harvest has a relatively new scaling plan that we're calling the Million Farm Transformation and we're slowly taking steps towards this big, audacious goal that we've set. And there are some different components to our scaling plan, but the key, if we are going to achieve it, as far as we can see, is it's going to be through partnerships with much larger institutions, and an obvious one is with governments, and that working with governments, as we know, brings a number of challenges, but I also think it brings some of the greatest potential to have a lasting, permanent impact on agricultural extension, on our food system on our planet, and so we're taking some little steps in that direction.
Speaker 2:We've begun some collaboration with the agriculture ministry in Belize recently, at a relatively small scale, but plans are being developed right now for a larger scale collaboration, which I hope will eventually lead to this kind of national transformation that I would like to see In Honduras. We're also collaborating with not with the agriculture ministry, but with the government's Institute for Professional Development and the pilot that I talked about, using the farmer mentors together with the professional trainers. That was done in partnership with Honduras' Institute for Professional Development and the pilot, as I said, was very successful, and we now have a larger plan for rolling that out at a larger scale, called the TREE Program Training to Expand Eco-Agriculture and it's been accepted as part of the Clinton Global Initiative, which we're excited about, and we hope that will eventually bring more support for it and that again it'll eventually lead to national level uptake of the type of methodology that SHI has been developing all these years.
Speaker 1:Very, very nice Yep, we got to bring all the voices to the table right.
Speaker 2:Yes, make the greatest impact do a lot of harm in our world. We see it happen all the time but they also have the potential to be a tremendous force for good, and we see that sometimes as well, and I'd love to see Sustainable Harvest partner with some of those businesses to really be a force for good in the world of agriculture and food.
Speaker 1:Indeed and more and more companies are realizing the importance of that and realizing the importance of the promotion of regenerative practices versus, you know, extractive.
Speaker 2:So that's good and the more, the more consumers ask for it and the more consumers vote with their dollars for those sorts of products, the more we'll see.
Speaker 1:Yeah absolutely so. Could you share a little bit of about the financials regarding how much your work with each family costs? And then most of your dollars that come into SHI come from I'm assuming donors and grants. So can you just talk a little bit about how those dollars are used and how much it costs, and a little bit about how people can get involved with SHI as a donor to promote the work you're doing?
Speaker 2:Sure Thanks. Well, to start, most of our funding comes from individual donors, the vast majority of it. We very recently hired a wonderful new grants manager, so we hope that we will be getting more funding from grants soon. We've always gotten some, but not very much, and a little bit from some businesses, but also not very much, and so we hope to grow in all of those areas. I think individual donors are really drawn to our work because they see the opportunity to get a lot of bang for their buck.
Speaker 2:One of our board members, who's, of course, also a donor, says that Sustainable Harvest is the Ginsu knives of international development work, where one donation you're having a positive impact on the climate, on biodiversity, on hunger, on poverty and so on.
Speaker 2:Historically, it has cost us about $2,000 per year to support one family's work in our program, part of our scaling initiative I mentioned.
Speaker 2:There are several pieces to it, the partnerships being a big one, but another one is trying out ways to become more cost-effective, bring down the cost of getting those results from the technical assistance, and so now, with this pilot I mentioned, with the farmer mentors, we are finding that we can cut the cost in half by working with farmer mentors in addition to the professional trainers, and so that takes the cost from $2,000 per year to $1,000 per year, and the goal that we have set in our scaling plan is to get the total multi-year cost down to $1,000 or less.
Speaker 2:So we have some other pieces that we're still looking at, such as some changes in the timing, where maybe we're reducing the number of years for changing the farming practices and then treating the business pieces as a separate add-on that we hope is at least self-sustaining for that part or ideally generates income to offset those first few years of training, and also maybe bringing in a little more technology to help with the training and deliver it more efficiently. Not that I think we would ever stop the face-to-face technical assistance I think that's critical but it could be made more efficient, I think, with some technology as well. So all of those together are moving us towards what had been a $10,000 cost to put a family through the program to what we hope will be under $1,000.
Speaker 1:Very cool, that's exciting. So where can people find more information about Sustainable Harvest International and, in particular, donating?
Speaker 2:Probably the easiest place to start is our website, which is sustainableharvestorg, and on there there's a link to make a donation and there's information about other ways to support our work as well. Another way to stay up to date on what we're doing is through social media. We have Facebook, we have Instagram, we have LinkedIn, where we post updates on our work.
Speaker 1:We have LinkedIn where we post updates on our work. Yeah, so, flo, also I know that you have a really exciting project that is about to become available. You all have been working on a film that features some of the farmers that are in the Sustainable Harvest International Network, and can you tell us a little bit more about that documentary that's coming up and where we can find it?
Speaker 2:I would love to. I'm super excited about this. The farmers in Central America have been my heroes for over 30 years and I'm so excited for this opportunity to share that with a much broader audience.
Speaker 2:Myriad Films has made an approximately 30-minute documentary that is absolutely beautiful, except the parts that I'm in, but the farms, the farmers, the forests is really really wonderful, really uplifting, and there's also a number of other people like Bill McKibben sharing their wisdom in the film, and it's really focused on the way small-scale farmers are transforming their lives and transforming their world in terms of food security, the environment and the climate world in terms of food security, the environment and the climate and the tremendous potential that they have in that regard.
Speaker 2:The film is called Roots of Renewal, and Max, the director, is putting the finishing touches on it now and we plan to premiere it later this month. And we plan to premiere it later this month and after that it will be airing for a year on WaterBear. If you're not familiar with WaterBear, I sort of think of it as the Netflix of environmental films or of impact films, where people can stream these wonderful films about work that is changing our world for the better and with a connection to how everybody can be involved and support these positive changes in our world. So that's at waterbearcom, and we also hope to have small screenings all over the country, and so anybody who would like to talk to us about hosting a screening, I'd love to talk to anybody about that.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love it. That's so, so exciting, and I'm very excited to learn about the Water Bear Network as well. So tell us the name of the film one more time Roots of Renewal Roots of Renewal so we can keep an eye out for that. I'm sure that y'all will have some information pop up on your website that will share a little bit more about that. Very cool, and I'll put that in the show notes as well, what that great name of the film is, so that people can keep an eye out. That's great.
Speaker 1:Well, I just really want to thank you so much, florence, for taking the time to speak with us today, and you know, I just commend you for sticking with this work for the past 30 years. I'm sure that being a nonprofit business owner and working internationally is no small feats, and so I commend you on, you know, being able to pull it to the place where it is today, and I'm excited for this expansion plan that you all have in place, that y'all are putting into practice, and I wish you all the best of luck with that. And, yeah, thank you for taking the time to chat with us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, karen. Thank you for your podcast, sharing valuable information with so many people For sure, thank you Well, folks.
Speaker 1:There you have it. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to follow the Land Food Life podcast to be notified of future episodes and check out previous episodes. We love hearing from our listeners, so please feel free to reach out with questions or comments at landfoodlifecom. We look forward to you joining us next time. Thanks again for listening today. Take care.
