» Helping the people of Suba
Green Giant Venture Fund has agreed to assist the community of Suba via working with Peter Ongele (Suba Farmers INFO Coordinator).
Peter Ongele’s words and description of the current problem and solution.
The concept of work with farmers is that, farmers here have been living in desperate situation with over 70% infected land with striga. Crops have not been doing well despite the heavy and laborious work farmers are going through. Every year, its famine, people become helples like right now. Government do little to support the poor communities. With several contacts and searching how best I can help my community with my research experience, I came over biochar which can be adopted easily by my colleage farmers here. I thought how best could I engage the farmers and to let them be convinced that biochar with the compost animal manures around could improve the soil fertility….thats the time I thought to approach the project to have the farmers to take the initiative through Farmers Participatory Research Approach (FPRA) of Biochar farming practice. Moreover, this helps the small holder farmers, to understand farming method, identify farming constraints, analyze soil fertility management options and evaluate Biochar technology option of soil management. In the long run, the goal is to establish the best option that can overcome some of the limitations experienced in soil management as well provide more additional ones.
The Biochar trial started by placing great emphasis to local farmers to solve the rapid declining soil fertility in their own capacity and help address the hunger disaster in the region since the decline is largely caused by continuous practice of the same traditional farming system in every planting season. More pressure for decline is further generated by increased human population, global climate change and increasing costs of organic fertilizers. It is encouraging that farmers have taken a step and are actively involved in the biochar trials and have evaluated the Biochar soil management productivity. This has encouraged holistic review of constrains in Biochar application soil management by including farmers opinions. In this regards, farmers have been directly involved in soil management practices by monitoring and evaluating Biochar farm trials-scoring and thereafter rank Biochar’s performance using their own criteria with the help of data taken and analysed accross the trial farms.
Biochar project in Suba District is endeavoring and taking into account drawbacks from past planting seasons as a yardstick to further improve and continue to develop more initiative, innovative and low cost technologies. The project has been reflecting general growth and development to eventual yield at harvest of crops more so maize has been documented. This synthesis documentations highlights the most likely promising research findings of Biochar soil management success in developing countries with an aim of identifying gaps for future research by experts. Also the success provides useful insights forward Biochar farming can be practiced. It has been wonderful and encouraging, as I’ve been trying to operate things at a low cost level to our community, and usually do consultations and meetings.
Poverty is more than the absence of material means or basic services, such as a lack of food, shelter, clean water, education or health. Poverty has created powerlessness to determine the quality of life, and compounds vulnerability when conflict or natural disaster strikes. We believe that most suffering is avoidable, being caused either by the direct action of others or indirectly through injustice, selfishness, inequality, neglect, or environmental and socio-economic imbalance. Although women form more than over half the community population, they have been receiving only a small share of development opportunities. Biochar project is giving more balance of project involvement for family supports. Twice as many men as women are directly involved in the work and if women who hold unpaid works as careers for the family and the household income would now be counted as productive in the community and the project would have a positive impact on the roll and participation of women in the community equally.
Community is taking good position to identify key problems in biochar farming system. The community is able to plan realitic solutions they have encountered in the last two biochar year trial. Carrying out early planning before the next planting season and individually measuring the success they had with biochar application on their farms. It looks biochar is the answer to our soil fertility management at per our standard ability for soil managent. We are to benefit the achievement of biochar project for our economic independence in the future as it has shown increament in our crop yields in the last two planting seasons.
Since then, I’ve not increased the number of farmers in the experiment because involves money…in that, we have to supply the farmers with same variety of the crops to plant and this has been a problem. And also recruiting volunteers to help in samplings at the harvesting time who would need some allowance at the end. Right now people are planting, some farms, in the expectation of getting support of more seeds to plant last year could not be supported and no data or observations done for they planted different varieties of crops. This was interesting because, the charcoal was mixed with human urine which most families had to go through and left out for a number of months and was to be mixed again with animal manures. These were thrown on the farms, and the farms did equally well with little striga infections.
What are we doing exactly?
Short term help in the form of food and cash donations of any size from anyone who has the heart to do so.
The long term and sustainable approach will be to develop intercropped Kiri plantations within the community. The Kiri plantations will provide revenue from timber, Biofuel and Biochar via pyrolysis.
The Biochar will be used in the local soil to amend the current soil conditions.
This project will also produce small scale Carbon Credits in the very near future.
Any cash donation will be considered as investment into the future Carbon Credit project.
For information regarding the Carbon Credit project and all Kiri project implementation aspects please contact Grant: gfg@greengiantventurefund.com. For information on how to donate food or cash please contact Peter in Suba directly: peterongele@yahoo.com
All of us wonder from time to time, how we can make an impact in other people lives that are less fortunate than us. As adults not so often, but talk to your kids or children around you and try to explain to them why some people suffer and others don’t. We all know the answer here: nothing less than opportunity, distribution of wealth and how much we all really need to be happy.
This project is an easy opportunity for someone who wants to make difference in a sustainable way.
We are open to the involvement of anybody in any way they want to help, so please don’t hesitate to make contact.
