Sustainable Farming Techniques Among Tzutujil

Just a quick walk through the village I live in provides plenty of examples of how indigenous farmers have held on to some traditional methods, including ones that the international community now pushes as "sustainable agriculture." Among the techniques practiced here that I also learned about in a classroom setting (B-O-RING) are agro-forestal systems, polycropping, and rotating of crops while letting that piece of land go fallow for a season or two.

The picture at right is taken from a rooftop of a building on the eastern side of town, of the base of the volcano San Pedro. You can see agroforestry examples throughout this photo. Interspersed between the milpa is banana, coffee and avocado trees, all of which fruit and bloom at different times, providing the landholder with numerous benefits year round. None of the plants or trees in this picture need nor use chemicals or machinery to maintain their productivity. Granted the pace is much slower than the pace of farmers in the industrialized system, but they’ve survived thus far…

The addition of trees to the growing of crops stimulates a setting much closer to nature and tends to nourish itself with the nutrients, sun, water, wind and other natural elements it needs. It also reduces waste materials--leaves fall to the ground to provide the soil underneath with mulch to prevent moisture evaporation and also organic material which eventually adds to the structure of the soil—this is taken into consideration and even appreciated rather than in the US, where people actually rake their yards and put the leaves in plastic bags to be collected by garbage men to throw into precious landfill space—WHERE IS THE LOGIC IN THIS!!).

While in the states, a piece of land like this would be growing at most two things (i.e. in the Midwest CORN and CORN, the south-east Christmas trees or southern California vineyards, etc.), this piece of land is growing a NUMBER of products--some of which are hard to tell and I only know from walking--including bananas, avocados, corn, beans, cabbage, onions, pine for firewood, coffee and probably a few more things I don't know about. The fact that there are a number of things growing allow income to be flowing into the landholder all year round and/or offer some extra security if one crop has an infection or doesn't do well during a particular season.

What I hope to do with the school garden project is reinforce local campesinos that ARE practicing sustainable methods, to let them know that the rest of the world is quickly learning how smart their systems are and how unsustainable the developed world's agricultural structure is. I realize that living here and preaching sustainable, organic agriculture is very different than living in the US. There is a much faster learning curve with a nearly year round growing season, there is a proficient water source (the lake) very near to the site and the industrialization of agriculture hasn’t already dominated the landscape as it has there.

BUT! There are many, many people who produce successfully AND organically in ALL of the States—through passive solar systems, through compost sharing programs, through farm to city networks (after all, you don’t have to be your own farmer—just KNOWING who your food producer is and what he is doing would change the world!) Organic farming is not to be looked at as going “backwards” in time or progress or it is taking into consideration the millions of mistakes we have made as a western culture in allowing one of our most basic rights (FOOD) to be monopolized by a few companies. While conventional crops now need more and more chemical or nonrenewable resources (this means fuel for large machinery, energy used in transport, laboratories, research, etc etc etc!) as inputs, organic farming increases yields each year as the soil metabolizes to the organic system (and as an organic farmer, you are paying attention to what the soil is lacking, what it is exceeding in, what it needs to improve). Organic farms typically need more educated labor but that is not a bad thing! Again, I have to cite Cuba which now has leading organic agricultural scientists figuring out exactly which microbial organisms assist the soil and which plants benefit each other when grown together, which plants will attract or distract insects that are pests to the desired crops and many, many other naturally occurring natural ways to deal with problems.