| International Partners
Through its trainings and publications, Ecology Action has catalyzed
projects worldwide. The projects below had their beginnings through
connections with Ecology Action or through people who had connections
with us. All of the projects have since put down strong roots and
have been the means by which hundreds of thousands of people have
learned how to successfully grow their own food.
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Mexico:
ECOPOL
Director Juan Manuel Martinez |
Kenya:
Manor House Agricultural Centre
Director Emmanuel Omondi |
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Ecuador:
ADYS
Director Mercedes Torres-Barriero |
Kenya:
Common Ground Project
Director Joshua Machinga |
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Uzbekistan:
Ecopolis
Director Irina Kim |
Russia:
Viola
Director Ludmila Zhirina |
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USA:
Steve Moore |
ADYS – ECUADOR
 Juan Manuel Martinez, Director of ECOPOL,
met Mercedes Torres Barreiro in 1997 and introduced her to GROW
BIOINTENSIVE. When Ecuador’s economic crisis struck a couple
of years later, Juan invited Mercedes to attend the 2000 “Soil,
Food, and People” Conference, where she made a moving presentation
about conditions in her country. During the conference, Juan met
nightly with participants from Latin America, including Mercedes,
to plan how to disseminate GROW BIOINTENSIVE in their countries.
Mercedes is an educational psychologist who had founded and was
the Director of ADYS (Self-Management and Development), which devotes
itself to training the leaders of community organizations in different
topics. Because of this, Mercedes was already in contact with many
community leaders, who were aware of her integrity and trusted her.
ADYS decided to spread the Biointensive method in Ecuador because
it was seen as a solution to the crisis they were living through.
The first demonstration project was at Pifo, near Quito, on some
land donated by a convent. The garden there has flourished, despite
many initial problems with the soil, and workshops are given regularly.
A dining room at the project uses produce from the garden to promote
the consumption of organic products and to feed a large number of
unemployed professionals, who in turn collaborate in ADYS’
projects. ADYS contacted the director of CIAT (Centro Internacional
de Agricultura Tropical) in Colombia, which sent 10 people to take
a course at Pifo. As a result, 25 communities in Colombia began
a Biointensive project and, as of the beginning of 2005, 70 families
are growing Biointensive gardens.
One of the fastest growing and most successful Biointensive projects
in Ecuador is at Lago Agrio, in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Colombian
refugees had poured into this area and were impacting the ability
of local people to feed themselves. ADYS encouraged the residents
to grow Biointensive gardens, and as of the end of 2004, there were
60 gardens in Lago Agrio and surrounding areas and 16 gardens at
the Colombian border. The 76 gardens are feeding about 2,400 people,
both refugees and very low- income locals. A kitchen has been established
to make marmalades from exotic fruits for income generation. The
UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and the UN’s
High Commission for Refugees in Ecuador have both given support
to this project, and the Ecuadorian government has committed annual
funding.
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COMMON GROUND PROJECT
 Joshua Machinga, from Kenya, was a six-month
intern at Ecology Action’s Mini-Farm in 1995 after graduating
from the Manor House Agricultural Centre’s two-year Biointensive
Agriculture certificate program. After spending some years as an
extension officer for Manor House, Joshua branched out on his own
and started the Common Ground Project (formerly called the Pilot
Follow-Up Project). The project started by initiating compost utilization
trials with two farmers, and also by training two other farmers
to grow 40-bed units for diet, compost and income. Throughout the
years, Joshua and his colleagues have taught farmers’groups
(a good percentage of them women) the basics of GROW BIOINTENSIVE,
not only in western Kenya, but also in Uganda. In recent years he
received a grant to start an affiliated project in Teso, an arid
area of western Kenya near Uganda.
Joshua and his wife Zipporah have also started a school for pre-school
and primary-age children. One of its missions is to re-connect children
with the Earth and to help them understand the importance of growing
food with Biointensive. This is because in Kenya farming is looked
down on and digging is regarded as a punishment. The school received
a grant in 2004 for fifth-grade students to teach Biointensive to
a women’s group composed mainly of widows and also to help
start gardens for families impacted by AIDS.
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ECOPOL
 Juan Manuel Martinez, who worked for the Mexican
Department of Social Security (IMSS), read the Spanish translation
of the first How to Grow More Vegetables shortly after it reached
Mexico. He tried out Biointensive and four other methods of small-scale
agriculture in the Menos y Mejores project which he directed, a
health program started in 1982 in one of the most environmentally
inhospitable rural areas of Mexico. He found the Biointensive system
the most effective and, in contrast with the other methods, it required
only the use of local resources. The health, nutrition and quality
of life of the beneficiaries of the program vastly improved during
its five-year duration.
Juan Manuel started ECOPOL (Ecology and Population)
in 1992, after he had arranged for two teaching trips that John
Jeavons made to Mexico. During the first trip John and Juan spent
time strategizing the most effective ways of disseminating the Biointensive
system throughout Mexico and Latin America. ECOPOL was the result,
a non-profit organization that would focus exclusively on this goal,
with Juan as its Director. Through Juan’s connection with
IMSS and his concerted outreach to other governmental and non-governmental
organizations, ECOPOL has been able to establish Biointensive food-growing
techniques as an integral part of services already being delivered
to rural populations. Because of these initiatives, an estimated
2,000,000 people in Mexico alone are currently benefiting by having
productive family gardens.
Over the years ECOPOL has identified key personnel
to be interns at the Willits Mini-Farm. These people have been responsible
for starting Biointensive projects in Chihuahua, Aguascalientes,
Mexico, Pueblo, Zacatecas and Veracruz states, where large numbers
of people—the majority of them rural poor and indigenous—have
been trained to grow their food more effectively. More recently,
ECOPOL has identified interns from Costa Rica, Colombia, Brazil
and Ecuador, who have completed training at the Mini-Farm. ECOPOL
also finds key people from various parts of Latin America—directors
of NGOs and others—and sends them for training at Las Can?adas,
the strongest and most complete GROW BIOINTENSIVE demonstration
and training site in Mexico.
During this last decade ECOPOL has extended its
reach, contacting people and organizations in most of the countries
of Central and South America, introducing them to GROW BIOINTENSIVE,
establishing and maintaining connections. Due to ECOPOL’s
efforts, a strong program now exists in Ecuador, and another is
developing in Paraguay. One result is the support of the UN’s
High Commission for Refugees in Ecuador and the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization for Biointensive gardens that Colombian refugees and
impoverished local people are growing in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Also, the Ecuadorian government has now committed annual funds for
the project.
The many years that ECOPOL worked establishing connections and laying the
groundwork had a great deal to do with the success of the inspiring six-day
Latin American "Soil, Food and People" workshop that took place in Costa
Rica in March 2006. 116 participants from 19 Latin American countries
learned GROW BIOINTENSIVE techniques, made demonstration gardens, and
networked with each other. Since the workshop Juan Manuel has been giving
follow-up trainings in the more than 14 countries that requested them, and
is continuing to reach out to make contact with an ever-growing number of
people and organizations.
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MANOR HOUSE AGRICULTURAL CENTRE
 In the early 1970s, Polly Noyce became acquainted
with Ecology Action and its Director, John Jeavons. In 1983 Noyce,
on a trip to Kenya, purchased a former boys’ school four hours
north of Nairobi and offered it to Ecology Action as a site for
a Biointensive training project. Ecology Action’s Board approved
the idea, and the Manor House Agricultural Centre was started in
1984, with a two-year program for training high school graduates
in Biointensive Agriculture (BIA) and other alternative technology
methods. In the early 1990s the Centre started giving one-week workshops
in which self-help groups from different communities—mainly
women farmers—came to learn BIA. Three-month and six-week
workshops are also given on request from staff of other organizations.
In 1994 Emmanuel Omondi from Kenya was a six-month
intern at Ecology Action’s Mini-Farm in Willits, California.
In 1996, Omondi became Director of Manor House and under his leadership
the Centre’s infrastructure, staff team building, programs,
outreach and connection with other development organizations have
been added or greatly improved. The many successful grants he has
written have resulted in needed structural improvements to the old
buildings and other physical setup of the school. Other grants have
funded an extremely effective outreach program that trains communities
to become mini-training centers (MTC). As of 2005, there are 25
MTC, each reaching out to other communities in its area. Omondi
has also contacted other NGOs and governmental development organizations
that are bringing services to rural people in the same area, in
order to help coordinate their programs, work together and avoid
duplication of efforts.
Manor House was the first organization in Kenya
to teach BIA and as a result over 100,000 people have been trained
since 1984 and 100 plus organizations in Kenya are teaching BIA.
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BIOINTENSIVE FOR RUSSIA
 In 1990 Carol Vesecky, a friend of Ecology Action,
helped arrange a one-week workshop at Stanford University for 10
gardeners from a Moscow gardening collective. In 1993 she facilitated
the Russian translation of How to Grow More Vegetables and started
Biointensive for Russia (BfR) as a means to get copies of the book
out to more Russians.
At the suggestion of John Jeavons, BfR began to
identify Eurasians to come to the Willits Mini-Farm for Biointensive
training. The first, in 1994, was Larissa Avrorina from Siberia.
The next year BfR sponsored several workshops in Siberia and also
facilitated garden research, which showed a two-fold increase in
yields using Biointensive. BfR also continued to identify people
to be trained in Willits: three in 1995, five in 1996 and one in
1997. Avrorina returned to Willits in 1997 to receive teacher training.
The following month she and Carol Cox (Ecology Action’s Research
Garden Manager) presented a three-day workshop in Siberia.
This was the beginning of a series of workshops—in
1998, 1999, 2000 and 2002—in Russia and Uzbekistan taught
by trainers from the U.S. The Russian translation of Ecology Action’s
Lazy-Bed Gardening was distributed at each of these seminars.
In 2001, BfR began inviting "ecotourists"
to go along on some of the Biointensive workshop tours. This was
a way to defray some of the expenses of the tours and help fund
some Biointensive projects in Eurasia. For four years, BfR has funded
the NGO Viola to actively conduct experiments testing the ability
of double-digging and composting to reduce the radionuclide uptake
in vegetables grown in the zone of Bryansk contaminated by the Chernobyl
nuclear accident. The experiments show that the radionuclide content
is reduced by approximately 30% using these methods. BfR is now
seeking US academic collaboration for continued experimentation
and further dissemination and discussion of these results.
Access Biointensive for Russia’s website,
http://biointensiveforrussia.igc.org,
for more information.
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ECOPOLIS – UZBEKISTAN
 Irina Kim came into possession of the only copy
of the Russian translation of How to Grow More Vegetables
that made its way to Uzbekistan. In 1994 she established Ecopolis,
headquartered in Chirchik, whose purpose is to offer environmental
education to the younger generation. Irina states that over half
of the land areas in Central Asia have been degraded, much of it
due to poor agricultural practices. In 1995 she organized an agroecology
resource center (Agrocenter), whose goal is to educate and train
both young people and adults in Biointensive sustainable mini-farming.
That same year the Agrocenter established the new occupation of
Mini-Farmer at a vocational school in Chirchik. As of 2003, the
Agrocenter had trained 765 high school students and graduated 164
students with Mini-Farming as their major. Student leaders from
the school Mini-Farmer Club conduct Biointensive training seminars
in various regions of Uzbekistan, particularly at the Nuratau Nature
Reserve, north of Samarkand; the Brichmulla Forestry Farm, north
of Tashkent; dacha plots in Chirchik; and at Nukus, the capital
of Karakalakstan in northwestern Uzbekistan, near the Aral Sea.
The Agrocenter has also established eight demonstration/research
gardens in different areas of Uzbekistan, created an association
of Biointensive dacha gardeners, and village Biointensive mini-farming
networks. Irina continues to teach 250 people a year in her high
school classes and workshops in 11 remote villages. She has also
begun teaching in cities in Kazakhstan, near the Uzbekistan border.
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INDIA
In 1976 Dr. C.V. Seshadri of the Murugappu Chettiar
Research Center in India responded to a letter Ecology Action had
sent out to alternative technology organizations around the world.
He was sent How to Grow More Vegetables and other materials, which
the research center began to test and teach in the city of Tharumani,
Madras state, as well as in several villages. In 1980 the Center
published a monograph: “Biodynamic Gardening,” which
gave the results of their project after 2-1/2 years and states that
How to Grow was used as their standard reference. The principle
conclusions were: “This method can be taught to people with
no previous experience of vegetable growing. They can produce good
yields with locally-available resources in poor soils.”
In 1990 Dr. Seshadri wrote: “We initiated
a project for the Department of Science and Technology, New Delhi,
Government of India. The aim of the project was to provide rural
women sustainable income by using the biodynamic [Biointensive]
techniques. One hundred women were trained and they started growing
vegetables using the Biodynamic gardening techniques in their backyards.
As there was no demand locally, a society by the name of Shaktha
Society for Women was formed to find a good market for these organically-grown
vegetables in the city. As the vegetables fetched them better prices,
the women got very much interested.”
Dr. Seshadri died later in the 1990’s and
we have lost track of the project. But we mention it because it
was the first international response to our work and the first large-scale
testing of the effectiveness of GROW BIOINTENSIVE sustainable mini-farming,
from which two detailed reports were published.
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KILILI SELF HELP PROJECT
 Kilili Self Help Project supports graduates of
Manor House Agricultural Centre in western Kenya in their work with
farmers.
Sandra Mardigian, director of Kilili Self Help
Project, had lived in Kenya in the mid-80s and had many friends
around the country. Back in the US in 1989, she raised money to
send a group of primary school teachers from Kilili Village in Machakos,
Kenya, to Manor House Agricultural Centre (MHAC) for a week-long
training workshop in practical Biointensive methods. Returning to
Kenya the following year, Sandra found that the teachers and their
students had beautiful, prospering Biointensive gardens at the schools,
the families were involved, and the project was a huge success.
Based on these results, Kilili Self Help Project
began to raise funds to sponsor other Kenyans to take the same program
at MHAC. For several years, core groups of farmers from one location
traveled to MHAC for a week of training and returned home to practice
the Biointensive method and train other farmers in their area.
Meanwhile, the number of highly qualified graduates
of MHAC’s two-year program was increasing each year. Since
there are very few paying opportunities for these young professionals,
Kilili Self Help Project began supporting their work with farmers.
Eventually, grants became almost entirely dedicated to helping MHAC
graduates with expenses for programs they initiate themselves, and
this has become the primary mission of Kilili Self Help Project.
The organization also provides financial-hardship scholarships for
recommended students enrolled in MHAC’s two-year program each
year.
In 2005, with support from Kilili Self-Help Project,
MHAC graduates trained more than 10,000 farmers in six-day workshops.
The cost: less than $6 per farmer!
Kilili Self Help Project is located at 260 Marion
Avenue, Mill Valley CA 94941; phone: (415) 380-0687; burckintl@aol.com.
Donations are gratefully accepted and all are channeled to this
essential work.
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LAS CAÑADAS
 In March 1998 Tania de Alba attended an Ecology
Action Three-Day Workshop in Willits. She had already been using
Biointensive techniques at her family ranch in the cloud forest
of Veracruz state, Mexico. In 2001 Tania’s husband Ricardo
Romero was a participant in our five-day Teacher’s workshop.
The two developed the ranch, Las Cañadas, into an eco-tourist
site that receives many visitors throughout the year. They began
giving regular six-day workshops, with six paying participants who
subsidize the six peasant farmers that also attend.
Karla Arroyo, the garden manager of Las Cañadas,
was a six-month Intern at Ecology Action in 2003. Besides managing
the 120 Biointensive beds (including a 40-bed demonstration and
teaching unit), Karla also teaches school children who come to tour
the garden and participants in the six-day workshops, as well as
working in the cheese factory they have onsite.
Juan Manuel Martinez, Director of ECOPOL, is
helping develop Las Cañadas as a training ground for people
from all of Latin America. Taking one-week workshops there in 2003
were staff people from organizations in Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia.
In 2004 there were people trained from two different organizations
in Bolivia and one from Ecuador.
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STEVE AND CAROL MOORE
 For
many years Steve and his wife Carol farmed in Pennsylvania, using
horses and exploring many facets of farming, including raising dairy
cows and beef cattle and keeping bees. But they struggled. Years
of diversifying and expanding their farm did little to increase
their income.
In 1992 a friend recognized their situation and
urged Steve to read How to Grow More Vegetables. Steve reluctantly
looked over the book and decided that the concepts were sound but
not practical. However, the friend did not give up. Steve and Carol
steadily built on their knowledge of sustainability and began familiarizing
themselves with John Jeavons’ work and research. They began
to see the results of Biointensive agriculture as they struggled
less and less. In 1995 Steve attended a Three-Day Biointensive workshop
which “sealed the deal.” Steve and Carol’s commitment
to Biointensive sustainable agriculture was assured.
Even though they worked hard to develop local
interest in organic produce, the demand was not yet there. Steve
arrived at the most frustrated point in his farming career. After
days of prayerful thought, wondering what he was supposed to do
in order to succeed, he was offered a position as the Director of
the Center for Sustainable Living at Wilson College in Chambersburg,
Pennsylvania. There they operated their successful 135-family CSA
(Community Supported Agriculture) and spearheaded CSA development
for the region.
After several years of this successful program,
they felt a need to move on. Their faith brought them to Sonnewald
Natural Foods, a 60-acre educational farm in Pennsylvania that has
been teaching interns about organic farming since the 1950s. Steve
became the farmer there and also developed two GROW BIOINTENSIVE
passive solar greenhouses for growing food all year long.
Taken from an article written by Elaine Branigan,
former apprentice at Sonnewald.
Update
As of the end of 2005, Steve had taught over 3,000 people. He has
now become the Farm Advisor at North Carolina Agriculture and Technology
State University and is in the process of setting up a GROW BIOINTENSIVE
Mini-Ag Center/Soil Test Station at the school’s research
area.
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Viola
 Ludmilla Zhirina and Igor Prokofiev of Bryansk,
Russia, started the non-profit Viola after their region received
fallout from the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986. The organization
is made up of teachers, doctors and students determined to do whatever
they can to educate the population on the dangers of radiation and
on methods of cleansing the body of radioactive substances.
Ludmilla first learned about Biointensive when
she met Carol Vesecky at an ecoforum near Kiev in 1995. After attending
a three-day workshop in Bryansk in 1999—sponsored by Biointensive
for Russia—Viola started disseminating Biointensive mini-farming
throughout the region. Fifteen seminars were sponsored in 2001.
The next year a conference was given for the directors of all Bryansk
schools, including administrators, principles and teachers. Viola
members have continued to conduct workshops ever since, extending
their range to Orel, east of Bryansk.
Each year since 2002 group members have conducted
experiments to see if radionuclide contamination of the vegetables
can be reduced using Biointensive techniques. Inhabitants have to
grow their own vegetables and grains in areas where radionuclide
levels can be 10 to 30 times normal. Test plots were used, growing
the same vegetables with Biointensive techniques and with conventional
methods. The yields from both were tested in a laboratory and soil
samples were tested with a Geiger counter. In the section using
Biointensive, contamination of the soil was decreased because of
deep digging of the soil. The radionuclides descended to deeper
layers, where they were washed down even deeper by ground water.
The vegetables grown biointensively contained fewer radionuclides
than those grown conventionally. Some vegetables were practically
free of contamination while others were 2-3 times more contaminated
than the norm (as opposed to 10-30 times). Saturating the soil with
compost has a favorable effect since humus ties up Cesium 137 and
St-90. Companion planting also helped. When beans and potatoes were
grown together, beans took up the radionuclides into their leaves
but not their fruit. When planted with beans, the potatoes did not
get contaminated.
In the fall of 2005 Viola members traveled into
other contaminated areas in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine to test
the extent of contamination still remaining.
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