Soil conservation is a cooperative effort

These parcels are used as an educational resource within their community of growers.  Technicians visit farmers’ parcels, demonstrating how to implement practices properly, bringing farmers to different parcels, creating a network of knowledge sharing.  This is an effective and powerful way to disseminate information about soil management practices, as all is illustrated right before the eyes of farmers.  This project also serves as an educational tool for young people.  I sat in on a training day for young, aspiring agronomists where technicians demonstrated how to properly construct terraces, prepare compost and foliar sprays in the correct ratios of ingredients and the best methods to then apply them in the coffee plantation.  These young people would then return with the information gained from this interactive, hands on experience to share with farmers in their communities. 

ASOBAGRI as a whole understands the importance of soil health, and realizes that it is not enough to simply understand, that action must follow. 

In spite of being historically marginalized in the past, working against extremely volatile markets and unfair trading policies, limited access to capital and other resources, and frequently affected by the forces of climate change and extreme weather events, this collective group of coffee farmers and the technicians have committed to reclaiming and sustainably managing their soils.  

Dana Christel hails from Wisconsin, and is currently a Soil Science graduate student at the University of Vermont. She is spending the summer in Guatemala working in soil conservation and sustainable soil management with smallholder coffee farmers as part of her thesis work.

Submitted by Dana Christel