Florence Reed has been working for decades with farmers in the Global South to try to develop more-sustainable farming techniques and bring back land depleted by slash-and-burn farming methods.
Reed was the latest speaker at the Jaffrey Amos Fortune Forum lecture series Friday, sharing her experiences as the founder of Sustainable Harvest International, an environmental nonprofit that partners with small farms to adopt regenerative farming practices.
Reed told the audience at the Jaffrey Meeting House that Sustainable Harvest has focused on working with small farms in Central America, including Belize, Honduras and Panama. Farmers in those areas have been practicing slash-and-burn farming, where they clear forests for farmland, for generations. Once, with much smaller populations, that may have been sustainable, Reed said, but now, farms are producing less and less as soil degrades and nutrients are depleted.
One of the things that sets Sustainable Harvest apart, Reed said, is that they don’t just teach farmers regenerative techniques and walk away. They work with families over a long period – four or five years – building on the previous year’s successes and letting the farmers see the benefits. Over the 25 years Sustainable Harvest has been working with small farms, more than 90 percent of them have continued with the methods they were taught while participating in the program.
The tenets of regenerative farming include reducing soil disruption, maximizing crop diversity, keeping the soil covered to maximize moisture retention, keeping living roots in the soil year-round and integrating livestock.
Reed said they mostly work with small farms for two reasons, one being that small farms, collectively, provide about 70 percent of the world’s food. The other being that small farms can make the changes necessary, where larger ones may struggle with the cost.
Small farmers usually jump at the opportunity, Reed said, because it benefits them.
“It’s almost a no-brainer when it comes to small holder farms,” Reed said. “It’s a myth that these organic farms aren’t as productive.”
One family Sustainable Harvest has worked with, the owners of a small farm in La Pedregosa, Panama, joined the program because they were struggling to grow food on their land, producing very little. Sustainable Harvest helped the family put in erosion barriers and create terraces out of their sloped land, taught them composting techniques to build up the soil and helped them increase their crop diversity from three of four crops to more than 20, along with teaching them how to propagate seeds and save them from year to year.
“As they see success, they want to do more of it,” Reed said.
That family was nearing the end of its multiyear program with Sustainable Harvest when COVID-19 hit, Reed said. They remained in touch with the family, who told them that food scarcity had hit their area, and that it was difficult to get to the market. When they did get to market, they weren’t always able to find food staples, but the family was able to feed themselves and their neighbors with the crops they were growing on their own land.
Reed said that food security is one of the goals of Sustainable Harvest, along with improving soil conditions. She said that learning about these techniques, what they can do for the land and becoming leaders in their own communities when it comes to educating other farmers causes “a real change in consciousness” for the farmers who participate.
To learn more about Sustainable Harvest International, visit sustainableharvest.org.
This Friday is the final Amos Fortune lecture for the 2022 series, featuring Steve Zakon-Anderson presenting “History of Contra Dancing: How it Came to be Identified with the Monadnock Region.” The talk is free and is held at the Jaffrey Meeting House on Friday at 8 p.m. People can also watch the presentation on the Amos Fortune Forum YouTube page.
Ashley Saari can be reached at 603-924-7172 ext. 244 or asaari@ledgertranscript.com. She’s on Twitter @AshleySaariMLT.