Most people in our area are subsistence farmers growing corn and beans with slash-and-burn techniques.  This is hard on the land and farmers end up going further and further into the mountains to cut lumber and clear land for food production.  The longer that people deplete the land with these farming methods, the less it produces and the drier our climate becomes. 

The staple crops, corn and beans, take 3 months to produce.  People put most of their capital into the seed they plant.  If there is crop failure, families may need to borrow money just to eat and survive.  They don’t have the capital or even the vision to invest in longer-term crops, such as 1-year-crops like bananas, plantains, or yucca, or 2-year-crops like pineapples.  If people started growing vegetable gardens it would help them diversify their diets and promote more nutritious eating. 

The local farmers plant at the same time, harvest at the same time, and sell at the same time.  This causes a glut in the regional market and the bean price temporarily plummets.  People sell at this low price and because they have no way to store their beans, they are back buying beans when the prices have risen again.  This cycle keeps people from getting out of poverty.  Many families around us struggle to have three meals a day. 

Our goal is to introduce new agricultural projects to our neighbors, so they can implement them and create a financial safety net, instead of always living on the brink of a crisis.  As we experiment with various crops and techniques, we can find what works well in our area and pass on some of these new ideas.  We plan to offer training courses where people come to work and learn a new skill and then we help the graduates of the course start with a project of their own.

Some of the things we hope to teach include beekeeping and grafting fruit trees. Beekeeping is cheap to start, easy to learn, and can produce a lot of income.  If people can learn grafting techniques, they can have great producing trees in a few years, with an abundance of good fruit that they can eat and sell. 

We want to use the land as best as we can, trying to be careful with our resources both in land and in finances.  We see agriculture as a means of providing both food for our kids and extra to sell.  We see it providing lumber that can both send kids to university and set up an endowment for the future of our ministry.  We also see agriculture changing the community around us so people can have a better life.