Presentation: Survey Results & Agriculture Plan of Action

This morning there was a meeting in Media Luna that was attended by members from nearly half of the families in the community, about 40 people. We presented the results from the survey as well as our plan to improve the quality of life in Media Luna through the optimization of agriculture. One method to improve agricultural production that we've identified is to covert the soil of Media Luna from chemical fertilizers to organic. The first components of this transition include finding an agriculture specialist that could assist us in the finalization of our proposal to the Municipality of Urubamba, such proposal aims to obtain state funds for the project (the municipality offers amounts up to 1,000,000 soles, about 300,000 US dollars for public infrastructure projects). It is imperative that funds for this project are obtained from the municipality or from a government agency because the project requires a large initial investment to cover soil analyses, the processes deemed necessary to improve the condition of the soil (there are many stones in the soil and the community believes that a tractor or some type of machinery is necessary to remove the stones and improve the overall soil quality), and the organic fertilizer products. Daniel has estimated the general cost of the transition to be about 50,000 soles.

An initial pilot project on a parcel of communal land is the best way to demonstrate the effectiveness of organic agriculture as well as teach the community how to create their own compost, a form of organic fertilizer that will eventually be sufficient to prepare the land for planting. The length of time necessary to convert the land is still unclear, from what we've been told it can take as little as one year or as long as five years. This is a subject matter that will be cleared up with a soil analysis. It is very possible that some pieces of land will take less time and others more time, depending on their location in the community.

The majority of the community realize that the land is dying from the chemically based products they use and are interested in pursuing an organic alternative. They agreed that we should continue with the project and that they would participate little by little, not 100 percent at first but that they wanted to see how a pilot project on communal land advances and determine from there if they want to participate in the transition project on their own land. A few community members voiced their doubts about organic products, because they are accustomed to using chemical products and feel more comfortable continuing to do so.

Although I now have only one week left in Urubamba, we hope to complete our proposal to submit to the municipality by the end of next week, ideally with the assistance of an agriculture professional.

The Possibility of Tourism in Media Luna

On Saturday November 7th Media Luna opened the largest water reservoir in the Sacred Valley. Daniel and I attended the festivities to observe and also converse with Zenobio, who had been out of touch for about two weeks. We found Zenobio at his house early in the morning, we discussed the assembly, when I would present the results of the survey to the Community Board and also asked about some rock paintings that Daniel was told about.

Zenobio confirmed the existence of the drawings and indicated roughly where on the mountain they're located. Thankfully there was a wait for the mayor to arrive and Zenobio was able to guide us up the mountain to the drawings, which were pretty well hidden. The quality of the drawings is not so good, considering they've been abandoned for any number of years. On the hike up the mountain we passed several Incan farming terraces, while not refinished they are in good condition. In addition to these sites, Zenobio told us that there is a lagoon on the peak of the mountain.

Upon the discovery of these sights in Media Luna, it became apparent that we should bring these sites to the attention of the municipality of Urubamba. It is the responsibility of the municipality to preserve these sites, the first step is to bring an archeologist to the site of the paintings to determine when and by who they were created, the second is to take the steps necessary to preserve the paintings and terraces, then we could discuss the possibility of using these sites to generate tourism revenue for the community of Media Luna.

We went to speak with the Department of Tourism at the municipality this morning about the sites. They were very receptive and asked for us to submit a proposal of action, defining the objectives of the project.

The Ministry of Agriculture, INIA and INCAGRO

Tuesday afternoon Daniel and I set out to Cusco with the intention to track down someone from the University of Cusco's Department of Agriculture. The campus of the Agriculture department is on the outskirts of Cusco, a 20-30 minute bus ride from the main campus. We arrived around 3pm and found out that the classes end by 1:30pm and that all of the professors and the dean were gone. With no other choice we headed back to the center of Cusco to visit the Ministry of Agriculture to see if we could find someone to speak with.

At the Ministry, we checked in with security and asked where we should go to find someone who worked in organic fertilizers. We were directed to the second floor of building to the rear of the lot, where INIA was stationed. INIA is the National Institute of Agricultural Innovation, part of the Ministry. The engineer who works in organic agriculture was traveling for the week but we were given his email address and told that the morning of the following Tuesday would be a good time to meet with him. We were also given the telephone number for the dean of the Department of Agriculture, something we weren't able to obtain at the campus security station.

On our way out Daniel noticed another office he wanted to look into. INCAGRO is a small office within the Ministry of Agriculture lot and we stopped in to present our work and find out what they do. We discovered that the office is in charge of a competition that awards funds to agriculture producers (associations, communities, etc.), based on the evaluations of proposals that such producers submit to the agency. These proposals must be sustainable and benefit their community. The funds used for the competition come from the World Bank and the agency is run by the state, the employees are paid by the state, the World Bank funds are only given to the agriculture producers that win the competition. The current competition is in the evaluation phase and the next competition will start in 2011.

We are still waiting on the community assembly in Media Luna, it has been postponed yet again to November 22nd, the day before I leave Urubamba. This is extremely frustrating as we cannot make any concrete decisions without the consent of the community. Hopefully, I will be able to present the findings of the diagnostic to the board of community leaders on November 8th.

A Different Spin on Organic Agriculture

The director of the Urubamba Agriculture Office referred us to Ing. Ciro Palomino Rivas, an expert in organic agriculture. After sending him an email on Tuesday, I received a very warm response the following day. Absolutely incredible after what I've come to expect when attempting to contact professionals by email. Saturday morning Daniel and I went to meet Ing. Palomino Rivas at his organic agriculture store in Cusco. We told him about our project in Media Luna and how agriculture had appeared as one of the most pressing problems in the community. The fact that the high price of chemical fertilizer and the damage it does to the soil entraps the residents of Media Luna, and other agriculture based communities for that matter, in a vicious cycle of spending more and more of their earnings on chemical fertilizers whose amounts need to increase every planting season to produce the same crop yield.

He gave us an introduction to the process of restoring the soils of the Sacred Valley to an organic state and also provided an overview of his products. Such products, he claims, work to restore the soil in one planting season rather than the five-year process discussed by other agriculture professionals. However, there is a high initial cost to switching to his products because the first year demands a large amount of product to treat the soil. Each following year the amount decreases and saves money in the long term compared with the use of chemical fertilizer. A primary difference between his products and chemical products is that improving the quality of the soil is the objective of organic fertilizer rather than individual crop growth. So instead of designing products that are crop specific, the organic alternative aims to restore the soil to a state that would benefit all crops.

Although the information he provided us is useful, it was surprising that there may be such an efficient way to convert the fields of Media Luna to organic fertilizers. So surprising that we know we need to find case examples of such transitions to ensure that the products really work that well and that he's not just saying what's necessary to obtain Media Luna as a major client.

Organic Agriculture

Some progress was made this week, despite an unsuccessful trip to Cusco on Wednesday. Daniel and I traveled to Cusco Wednesday morning to visit the Agriculture department at the University of Cusco and to meet a contact given to us by the director of the Agricultural office in Urubamba. The contact is the owner of a store devoted to organic agricultural products.

He was traveling for the week but we were given his business card and contact information. We then went to the University of Cusco to see whom we could find from the Agriculture department. To our dismay, we discovered that the Agriculture Faculty resides on the other side of Cusco, about 40 minutes away from the main campus. After waiting about 30 minutes for a bus to take us there, we decided to go another day because we wouldn’t arrive at the other campus until 1pm, just as the leisurely Peruvian lunch hour begins. We saw the Cusco counterpart to the Agricultural office of Urubamba and went in to see if we could find anyone but everyone was on lunch.

Wednesday night we finally got in touch with Zenobio, the president of Media Luna, and set up a meeting for the following morning. Thursday morning we met Zenobio at his chacra, located outside of Media Luna. The first order of business was discussing the date for the next assembly. Since we’ve completed the survey, I’ve compiled the results of the survey into a presentation needs to be shown to the community members of Media Luna. Also since the completion of the survey, the assembly date has continued to be postponed. Due to a number of holidays and days set to work on community projects the assembly is now supposed to take place the first weekend in November, however it is unclear whether it will be Sunday November 1^st or the following weekend. Regardless, we haven’t been able to do much without the occurrence of the assembly.

On a positive note, he showed us the mix of compost and manure that he uses as an organic form of fertilizer. When using organic fertilizer, the process of preparing the land for planting is much more time consuming and effort intensive. Instead of spending a week preparing the soil with fertilizer, Zenobio told us that he treated the soil with the organic fertilizer for six months before planting. He also told us that he planted 3 days after his aunt, who used chemical fertilizers, and his corn crops are taller and healthier than hers. We also discovered that there is a piece of communal land in the community (about 4,000 square meters) that can be used as part of a “transitioning to organic” pilot project.

Agricultural Support for Media Luna

The past week and a half has been spent attempting to establish contact with agricultural professionals in the Cusco region. Email does not work in the same way as it does in the U.S. When I first started to look for contacts I searched the webpage of the University of Cusco's Agriculture Department for email addresses or other contact information to get in touch with some of the professors. Only two out of fifteen professors had email addresses listed, neither of them responded to my email. Also the general email address for the department is not functioning. While I was surprised by the lack of access to the professors (I'm accustomed to being able to find any professor's email address, mailing address, phone number, etc. on their university websites), Daniel, a native Peruvian, was not surprised in the least. He was actually more intrigued by my plan to look up the email addresses of the professors. His plan was to just go to the University of Cusco and wander around until we found someone.

Since last week the plan has become somewhat more fine-tuned. Just walking around Urubamba I noticed a building marked as an office of Agrorural, part of the Peruvian Ministry of Agriculture. Daniel and I went to present Nexos, our project and ourselves in Media Luna hoping that they would have some information to offer us. We explained that we've found agriculture to be the most pressing issue in Media Luna, with the high cost of fertilizer reducing the productivity of the community member's fields. Not surprisingly, we were informed that they don't work in that area but there are two other Ministry of Agriculture offices we could visit, one in Urubamba just farther down the road and the other in Calca, a town about 30 minutes away.

Today we finally were able to sit down with the director of the Agricultural office in Urubamba and were able to speak to him about the project and what steps would be necessary to take from here. The director was very informative, expressing how the soil of the entire valley has become deteriorated from the use of chemical fertilizers, one in particular doing the most damage, UREA. Each year more chemical fertilizer is necessary to replace the natural nutrients that the fertilizer strips from the soil.

It takes five years to convert the soil back to its organic nature. During these five years the soil must be treated with guano (manure) and small amounts of chemical fertilizer can be used to maintain the soil's productivity. Switching directly to a purely organic fertilizer would result in nearly no crop yield, doing much harm to the livelihood of the farmers. Although it is accepted that organic crops are better quality than the alternative, there is little incentive to produce organic crops. There is not a market for organic products in Urubamba and even if there were there's no agency responsible for verifying that a product is organic.

Another problem plaguing the effectiveness of fertilizer is the method used to irrigate the fields. The fields are irrigated basically by gravity, the flowing of the water strips away the nutrients, chemical or natural. The director explained that another form of irrigation, such as micro pressure, would reduce the amount of nutrients removed from the soil during irrigation. This process would have a high initial cost, i.e. installation, but overtime it would provide more water to the field as well as produce crops in a greater quantity and of better quality.

However, the Agricultural office we visited is primarily administrative in its duties and does not provide technical support. The director told us that it is necessary to have a soil conservation professional conduct an analysis of the soil; this could be a professor or possibly students of agriculture. Following the analysis, a parcel of the community's land must be secured for agricultural demonstrations. Although we still have not secured support for the project we have been introduced to important information regarding the nature of the Sacred Valley's soils and possible agricultural contacts in Cusco.

Agriculture in Media Luna

The residents of Media Luna primarily rely on agriculture as a source of food and income. Through the results of the survey, it is becoming apparent that the problems with crops have a serious affect on the well being and livelihood of the families living in Media Luna. The two principal factors that affect the production of crops are the availability of water and fertilizer.

The irrigation system of Media Luna is based on taking turns. There are several irrigation streams that run throughout the community with smaller canals leading to different fields. The smaller canals' access to the stream water is shut off on certain days by blocking the water flow with a metal panel. One day certain community members irrigate their fields; the next day another group of community members irrigate their fields. While the system is the best that can be done at this time, the overall lack of water consensus is that no one receives enough water to satisfy the needs of the crops.

The fertilizer or abono as it's called here, is relatively expensive (90-95 soles, around $30, for 50 kg); therefore, the individual families aren't able to buy a sufficient amount of it. Our idea is to determine a simple and inexpensive (possibly organic) way for the community members to create their own fertilizer. We hope that in addition to the homemade fertilizer being cheaper, that it will also have less of a negative impact on the environment. As the fertilizers currently used are mainly chemically based, an organic alternative will not only last longer but will be better for the fields and the surrounding environment overall.

In order to make sure that the needs of the soil and crops will be met, I've been working to establish contact with someone who specializes in this field. The University of Cusco has a department devoted to Agriculture and Zoology (Agonomia y Zootecnia) and seems like a good source to explore. However, unlike many U.S. university websites (the websites I'm used to searching) the emails of most professors are not listed on the Peruvian university websites. So the two that are listed will receive an email from me and hopefully will be able to provide information or direct me to someone who can.

The idea of teaching the Media Luna residents how to make their own fertilizer seems to be a sustainable plan. They should have a great interest in this project, as a major complaint we've heard is that the fertilizer from the stores is too expensive. We just need to make sure that the fertilizer will be as effective if not more effective than the products they currently use.